FAN Bulletin 810

June 10, 2007

Dear All,

A few items before I get to the new evidence that fluoridation is not helping poor and minority kids.

1. Warning! You might be getting several bulletins from me today. Sorry for the overload but this is because I have been on the the road for several weeks (UK, Isle of Man, Italy and California) and on Monday I will be having a hip replacement, so I will be out of action for several more weeks.  Thus I have a lot of catch up to do. Don’t feel obliged to read all these bulletins at one sitting – you will have several weeks to digest them!

2. Gerhard Bedding sent me the hard copy of an excellent article on fluoridation which appeared in a recent issue of the magazine SAGE, which is the magazine published by Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. The article entitled “The Furor over Fluoride” was written by Katherine Jamieson and appeared in Sage, volume 1, issue 11. I am trying to get an electronic version of this article to share with you, so if any of our sleuths out there know how to get this please send it to me post haste.

3. The hits are rattling along on the fluoride videos on Google video. You can access these videos from the FAN home page (top item) with just one click each. Go to FluorideAction “The Fluoride Deception” still heads the pack with 30,475 hits. “Don’t Swallow Your Toothpaste” (UK) is second with 3,255 hits and both the Fox story on Chester Douglass’s cover up of the Bassin study and the news item from Australia on people supersensitive to fluoride both have over 2000 hits. The news item from Tennessee of the ADA’s warning to parents not to use fluoridated water to make up baby formula has over 1000 hits. Slowly but surely more and more people are getting educated on this issue, despite the mainstream media’s failure to do a professional job on the subject.

4. Please remember that our web page keeps track of the latest news as it appears around the world. Go to the homepage and click on “latest news” in the left hand search bar. This is what has appeared there so far in the first 9 days of June:

Jun 09, 2007
          Anti-fluoride move on ballot in Longmeadow (Massachusetts)
Jun 09, 2007
          Bolivar Peninsula officials will decide next week whether or not to add fluoride to the public water supply. (Texas)
Jun 07, 2007
          Stuart, Martin County, to put water fluoridation question on November ballot (Florida)
Jun 07, 2007
          Corning Fluoride Update (New York)
Jun 06, 2007
          Rotherham Council rejects fluoridation (England)
Jun 05, 2007
          SECOND OPINION: Toothpaste trouble (Massachusetts)
Jun 05, 2007
          Binghamton water filtration plant evacuated (New York)
Jun 05, 2007
          Fluoride contamination is putting Yemeni bones at risk (International)
Jun 04, 2007
          Fluoride, a longtime blessing, now a curse? (Florida)
Jun 02, 2007
          Poughkeepsie water board chairman doesn’t want fluoridation of water to resume (New York)
Jun 02, 2007
          More winners and losers in the week’s news (Oregon)

5. “Oral Health Improves Overall but Gaps Exist.”  As our readers well know, the number 1 argument used by promoters of fluoridation is that we need to fluoridate the water to help poor and minority kids. However, over the last few years  newspaper reports from several major cities (Boston, Pittsburg, NYC, Cincinnati, etc) indicate a dental crisis among poor and minority kids despite the fact that these cities have been fluoridated for over 20 years. This is what you would expect when you know that a) fluoride works topically not systemically (CDC, 1999, 2001), thus you are not going to see much benefit – if any – for kids living in fluoridated communities and b) the real cause of tooth decay is poor diet, lack of parental oversight, lack of dental insurance and the failure of 90% of American dentists to treat children on Medicaid.

Now, thanks to the sleuthing of Carol Kopf of NYSCOF@aol.com (and please if you don’t receive her excellent updates beg her to put you on her list) we see that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services, has admitted (but not in as many words!) that despite 60 years of touting the propaganda line that fluoridation helps poor and minority kids, their figures show that this is not the case. You can read the full report as a pdf file.

But the myth that fluoridation helps poor kids continues. What makes this so troubling is that poor kids are the most likely to be damaged by excess fluoride because of their greater chance of having poor nutrition. Meanwhile, it is precisely poor families who are least likely to be able to afford avoidance measures if they do not want their kids to get fluoride. Specifically, they are least able to afford bottled water to make up baby formula. Thus, despite the propaganda, fluoridation does not improve equity, it further erodes it.

I have printed the key excerpt from this report below.

Paul Connett
———————————————-
http://www.ahrq.gov/research/dentalcare/dentria.htm#poor/
(Same as above link)

US Department of Health and Human Services
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

Dental Care
Improving Access and Quality
Research in Action, Issue 13

Dental care research funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) looks at the impact of a wide variety of factors. These include the impact of reimbursement, race, income, and age on access to and use of dental care…

Oral Health Improves Overall but Gaps Exist

Over the past several decades, oral health in the United States has improved (a). Among most age groups, the average number of teeth per person affected by dental caries has decreased. Also, the average number of teeth per person that show no signs of infection, as well as the proportion of the population that is caries free, has increased. In addition, a lower proportion of U.S. adults have lost all their natural teeth (a process associated with both tooth decay and periodontal disease) now than was the case two decades ago. This improvement is most pronounced at older ages.

Despite the overall improvement in oral health status, gaps in the provision of care remain. Over the 20-year period 1977-96, the gap in the use of services between low-income people (those with incomes under 200 percent of the Federal poverty level) and higher income people (those with incomes over 400 percent of the Federal poverty level) increased.2 The number of preventive visits is below recommended levels, and access to dental care remains problematic for minorities, the elderly, children on Medicaid, and other low-income children. For example:

    * More than one third (36.8 percent) of poor children ages 2 to 9 have one or more untreated decayed primary teeth, compared to 17.3 percent of nonpoor children.
    * Uninsured children are half as likely as insured children to receive dental care.3
    * Untreated dental decay afflicts one-fourth of children entering kindergarten in the United States.
    * Low-income and minority children have more dental cavities than other children.
    * Poor Mexican-American children ages 2 to 9 have the highest proportion of untreated decayed teeth (70.5 percent), followed by poor non-Hispanic black children (67.4 percent).
    * Poor Mexican-American and non-Hispanic black children see the dentist less often than other children.
    * Less than one of every five poor children enrolled in Medicaid receives preventive dental services in a given year, even though Medicaid provides dental coverage for enrolled children.

In addition to the considerable access problems faced by poor and Medicaid-eligible children, poor elderly people and minorities have their own problems with access.

    * In the 50-69 age group, non-Hispanic blacks (31.2 percent) are more likely than Mexican Americans (28.2 percent) or non-Hispanic whites (16.9 percent) to have at least one tooth site with periodontal disease.
    * In the age category 70 years and over, the percentages rise to 47.1 percent, 32.0 percent, and 24.1 percent for the three groups.

With more elderly people having discretionary income and retaining their natural teeth, demand for dental services among the elderly has grown. But this demand can be substantially influenced by financial barriers and other health concerns. Studies show that the elderly typically underuse needed dental services.

The underuse of cost-effective preventive services such as dental sealants, plastic coating applied to protect the chewing surface of teeth, also illustrates that dental care in the United States has room for improvement.