BACKGROUND The Local Government Area of Gosford implemented a water fluoridation scheme in 2008. Therefore the opportunity was taken to record the dental health of primary school children aged 5-7 years prior to the fluoridation and compare the results with other communities in NSW with different access to fluoridated water. The aim was to compare the oral health of New South Wales (Australia)s...

OBJECTIVE Fluoride was first added to the Australian water supply in 1953, and by 2003, 69% of Australia's population was receiving the minimum recommended dose. Extending coverage of fluoridation to all remaining communities of at least 1000 people is a key strategy of Australia's National Oral Health Plan 2004-2013. We evaluate the cost-effectiveness of this strategy from an Australian health...

and severity of dental caries among children in the Republic of Ireland has declined dramatically since the 1960s. Much of this decline has been attributed to the availability of fluoride, through water fluoridation and also through the home use of fluoride toothpastes. 1,2 However, in spite of the overall improvement in dental health, caries remains a very common disease among Irish children, ...

Recent questions about the effectiveness of water fluoridation have come from Diesendorf in Australia and Colquhoun in New Zealand. This report examines the arguments of both authors in detail and finds errors in each. Diesendorf employed an outdated view of how fluoride exerts its anticariogenic action and took a number of quotations out of context. Colquhoun's data are questionable. Neither a...

A review of recent scientific literature reveals a consistent pattern of evidence--hip fractures, skeletal fluorosis, the effect of fluoride on bone structure, fluoride levels in bones and osteosarcomas--pointing to the existence of causal mechanisms by which fluoride damages bones. In addition, there is evidence, accepted by some eminent dental researchers and at least one leading United State...

Silicofluorides, widely used in water fluoridation, are unlicensed medicinal substances, administered to large populations without informed consent or supervision by a qualified medical practitioner. Fluoridation fails the test of reliability and specificity, and, lacking toxicity testing of silicofluorides, constitutes unlawful medical research. It is banned in most of Europe; European Union h...

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...

A recent Cochrane review on water fluoridation found that the initiation of water fluoridation resulted in reductions in dmft of 1.81 (35%) and in DMFT of 1.16 (26%). There were also increases in the percentage of caries-free children (deciduous dentition: 15%, permanent dentition: 14%). However, the majority of the studies were conducted prior to 1975, and the widespread use of fluoride toothp...

Research on the effects of fluorides on oral health has been in existence for almost a century. Following the observation that communities with naturally fluoridated drinking water had a lower incidence of tooth decay, many developed countries initiated artificial water fluoridation programmes, whereby fluoride is added to the reticulated water supply, such that it reaches approximately one par...

OBJECTIVES To examine the perceived harms/risks of fluoridation as expressed in online forums relating to cessation and aftermath in Calgary, specifically, 1) which harms/risks are mentioned, 2) for those harms/risks, what kinds of evidence are cited, 3) to what extent is scientific literature cited, and what is its quality, and 4) for a subset of harms/risks, what is known from the broader sci...