AS A HEALTH MEASURE, the fluoridation of community water supplies has 4 been approved and enthusiastically endorsed for over a decade by virtually L all the important health people and organizations in the country. Its value is being verified by an increasing number of experiments, urveys, and studies. Yet at the same time it is being rejected more and more consistently by voters at the local l...

OBJECTIVE To review the safety and efficacy of fluoridation of drinking water. DESIGN Search of 25 electronic databases and world wide web. Relevant journals hand searched; further information requested from authors. Inclusion criteria were a predefined hierarchy of evidence and objectives. Study validity was assessed with checklists. Two reviewers independently screened sources, extracted da...

This paper reviews the scientific events culminating in the fluoridation of communal water supplies. Dental and medical studies completed by 1942 had established the safety and benefits of exposure to drinking water naturally containing fluoride. Researchers and public health workers concluded that it was possible to test the hypothesis that the dental benefits attained where fluoride levels ar...

OBJECTIVE To assess the fluoridation of the public water supply and compare these results with previous data. METHODS The study was carried out from March 2004-2005 in Bauru, a city of Southeastern Brazil. Every month, on dates established randomly, 60 water samples were collected from the 19 supply sectors of the city, totaling 737 samples. The fluoride concentration in the water samples was...

The case of Ryan v. Attorney General involved a challenge to the constitutional validity of the Health (Fluoridation of Water Supplies) Act, 1960, which provided the legislative basis for the fluoridation of the public water supply. While the importance of this case in the history of water fluoridation is well known, its contribution to constitutional law in this country may not be as widely ap...