written by Alex Lahr
We can choose the food that stocks our fridges and the vitamins that line our medicine cabinets - why can’t we select the water that gets pumped out of our faucets? Since the 1940’s, the US government as well as those of many other English-speaking countries, has been dumping fluoride into the public water supply in an effort to improve public oral health. But if no one forces us go to a physician or visit a chiropractor, on what grounds is forced fluoride consumption justified? Government addition of fluoride to the public water supply is controversial because it infringes on the public’s right to choose what lifestyle choices it deems healthy or not and forces it to carry out a government-ordained practice.
We can choose the food that stocks our fridges and the vitamins that line our medicine cabinets - why can’t we select the water that gets pumped out of our faucets? Since the 1940’s, the US government as well as those of many other English-speaking countries, has been dumping fluoride into the public water supply in an effort to improve public oral health. But if no one forces us go to a physician or visit a chiropractor, on what grounds is forced fluoride consumption justified? Government addition of fluoride to the public water supply is controversial because it infringes on the public’s right to choose what lifestyle choices it deems healthy or not and forces it to carry out a government-ordained practice.
Fluoride is not bad. It is naturally present in water and can improve dental hygiene. However, the unethical implications of community water fluoridation do not arise from the conspiracy that the government is trying to poison us with chemical overdoses. Rather, they stem from the public’s disenfranchisement that results from the public’s inability to choose what goes in its water. Individuals in society can either drink the fortified water that public works provides them or buy the much more expensive and equally ethically problematic bottled water. The public finds itself proverbially stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Excess fluoride can be dangerous, but is usually limited to enamel fluorosis in young children that suck down tubes of Crest instead of vanilla icing. Excess fluoride ingestion rarely stems from water fluoridation. Community water fluoridation—successfully introduced in 43 of the nation’s 50 largest cities— is responsible for a 50-60% reduction in tooth decay since World War II. Fluoride, when used properly, helps prevent and even reverses the advances of decay-causing bacteria.
Frankly, the argument that community water fluoridation is bad for public health is a moot point, ignorant of the masses of research churned out by the CDC and other health institutions in the last 50 years. Therefore, the potentially ethically problematic elements of community water fluoridation arise not from the harmful effects of fluoride, but from some more ambiguous source.
Some proclaim that it is dangerous and that fluoride concentrations are too difficult to control, but I will disregard these claims based on the overwhelming evidence against them and because they are inessential to the underlying cry of protest that echoes from most adversaries of community water fluoridation.
The controversy surrounding community water fluoridation comes from some sort of “Big Brother” paranoia, a public sentiment that “I choose what my family eats, what it drinks, what vitamins it takes, what doctors it visits— no one can force me in any particular direction”. By fortifying public water with fluoride, the government is taking away the public’s ability to decide for itself whether or not it wants to ingest fluoride, whether or not sees fluoride as a health risk or a necessary precaution to tooth decay.
Excess fluoride can be dangerous, but is usually limited to enamel fluorosis in young children that suck down tubes of Crest instead of vanilla icing. Excess fluoride ingestion rarely stems from water fluoridation. Community water fluoridation—successfully introduced in 43 of the nation’s 50 largest cities— is responsible for a 50-60% reduction in tooth decay since World War II. Fluoride, when used properly, helps prevent and even reverses the advances of decay-causing bacteria.
Frankly, the argument that community water fluoridation is bad for public health is a moot point, ignorant of the masses of research churned out by the CDC and other health institutions in the last 50 years. Therefore, the potentially ethically problematic elements of community water fluoridation arise not from the harmful effects of fluoride, but from some more ambiguous source.
Some proclaim that it is dangerous and that fluoride concentrations are too difficult to control, but I will disregard these claims based on the overwhelming evidence against them and because they are inessential to the underlying cry of protest that echoes from most adversaries of community water fluoridation.
The controversy surrounding community water fluoridation comes from some sort of “Big Brother” paranoia, a public sentiment that “I choose what my family eats, what it drinks, what vitamins it takes, what doctors it visits— no one can force me in any particular direction”. By fortifying public water with fluoride, the government is taking away the public’s ability to decide for itself whether or not it wants to ingest fluoride, whether or not sees fluoride as a health risk or a necessary precaution to tooth decay.