Because of its contribution to the dramatic decline in tooth decay over the past 75 years , CDC named community water fluoridation as 1 of 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century. See where your state ranks in percent of the population that receives water with fluoride. Community water fluoridation has been shown to save money, both for families and the health care system.
The return on investment for community water fluoridation varies with size of the community, increasing as the community size increases. Community water fluoridation is cost-saving, even for small communities.
Learn more about this goal external icon. Effectiveness of fluoride in preventing caries in adults. J Dent Res. On the epidemiology of fluorine and dental caries. In: Gies WJ, ed. Fluorine in Dental Public Health.
Effect of fluoridated public water supply on dental caries prevalence. Public Health Rep. An economic evaluation of community water fluoridation. J Public Health Dent. Guide: Fluoridation Facts. The premier ADA guide to fluoridation, available in print and electronic formats. Fluoridation Resources. Videos, articles and public policy statements on fluoridation and oral health.
Clinical guidelines. The latest evidence-based guidelines on topical fluoride products, toothpastes and more. Fluoridation FAQ. Science-based answers to common questions about fluoride in water. Recent fluoride issues. Facts on new fluoridation systems, overall health effects and more. More about fluoridation and oral health. Tooth decay plagued everyone—rich and poor, famous and obscure.
George Washington, an affluent planter, had lost all but one of his teeth by age 57, when he was first sworn in as president. Washington was not alone. Fortunately for denture customers, Europe had a ready supply.
Scavengers followed wartime armies, according to the medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris. After the shooting stopped at the battle of Waterloo, many of the dead were toothless within hours. In the first decades of the 20th century, American dentists regularly made full sets of dentures for teenagers so that they would look presentable at graduation. American soldiers were required to have a minimum number of opposing teeth: six on the top, six on the bottom.
Thousands of would-be doughboys and GIs were barred from service in the First and Second World Wars for failing to meet this standard. From May The truth about dentistry. So dire was the state of U.
McKay was a dentist in Colorado Springs. McKay contacted a famous Chicago dentist famous in dental circles, anyway and got him to describe the syndrome to the Colorado state dental association. Hardly anyone paid attention.
They found that students raised in Colorado Springs had discolored teeth, whereas students from other areas had normal teeth.
Still, hardly anyone paid attention. In the s, McKay and others identified the staining agent: naturally occurring fluoride compounds in water supplies. This kind of staining, along with the other negative effects of fluorine absorption by bones and ligaments, is now called fluorosis. The researchers also discovered something else: Although the staining looked terrible, people with fluoride stains had fewer decayed and missing teeth.
A small group of dentists began agitating to add low levels of fluoride to drinking water—low enough to avoid staining and also low enough to be safe. Those dentists would soon get corporate reinforcement. Fluorine, a chemical element, is lethal in small doses and extremely reactive. Fluorides—compounds of fluorine—can be nearly as toxic but are much more stable. They are a common waste product of the fertilizer, pesticide, refrigeration, glass, steel, and aluminum industries.
Understandably, executives were thrilled to discover that the chemicals they had to get rid of because they could seep into city water systems might be gotten rid of by being jettisoned into city water systems. Less understandably, some later anti-fluoridation activists described the corporate embrace of fluoridation as evidence of a Communist plot. It was more like a capitalist plot. From to , the secretary of the Treasury was Andrew W. Mellon, a founder of the Aluminum Company of America, better known as Alcoa.
The U. Public Health Service was then under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department. In January , Alcoa chemists discovered high levels of fluoride in the water in and around Bauxite, Arkansas, an Alcoa company town.
Eight years later, a biochemist at the Mellon Institute, in Pittsburgh, became the first researcher to call for the widespread fluoridation of water. Additional impetus came during the Second World War. The Manhattan Project—the crash effort to develop the atomic bomb—processed uranium by combining it with huge amounts of fluorine to form uranium hexafluoride.
Large quantities of other fluoride compounds, including the DuPont refrigerant Freon, were needed. Accidents exposed employees to these little-understood substances, killing some and sickening others. Under the guise of protecting teeth, the Manhattan Project set about obtaining data on long-term fluoride exposure.
Both cities added fluoride to their water. In both cases, the control was a nearby city that did not add fluoride. The experiments were supposed to continue for at least a decade, with dentists in each city examining their patients to evaluate long-term effects. As it happened, one of the control cities fluoridated its water within seven years because its citizens had heard rumors about the benefits. Fluoridation took off. So did the anti-fluoride movement, a loose coalition of Christian Scientists, Boston society ladies, chiropractors, biochemists, homeopaths, anti-Semites, and E.
Bronner, the spiritualist soap-maker. The opposition mostly failed.
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