Water & Fluoride: It Checks Out
We made it through a whole week, mates!
But enough about that-you're probably looking for the answer to our teaser from earlier in the week, right?
Look no further!
First thing's first.
The idea of adding fluoride to public drinking water stemmed from an odd dental problem some parts of the US were noticing that came to be called the Colorado Brown Stain.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, here.
The phenomenon was first reported in 1901 when a dental school graduate named Fredderick Mckay left his home on the East Coast and opened a dental clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There he met a slew of patients who all exhibited the same dark brown stains all over their teeth. He was confounded. Unfortunately, however, other local dentists didn't seem to share an interest in finding the cause of the problem.
Over time and due to his own endeavors to investigate the problem, his cause eventually won the attention of local professionals. As there was no mention of this strange dental ailment in any of the literature at the time, it helped to have the support of other dentists practicing at the time, as this afforded Dr. Mckay the opportunity to extend an invitation to a certain Dr. Green Vardiman Black via the Colorado State Dental Association to the 1909 dental convention. There Dr. Mckay would present his findings on the subject of the Colorado Brown Stain and perhaps gleam a solution with the help of Dr. Black, as he was one of the country's most esteemed dental researchers at the time.
Dr. Black at first thought it impossible that such an ailment would have gone unpublished in the dental literature of the time but when the Colorado Springs Dental Society released a study indicating that 90% of the city's children had the same brown stains, curiosity won him over and he headed West to see this epidemic with his own eyes.
Upon arriving, he was shocked to see that it was indeed true. And so, he and Dr. Mckay spent the next six years working on finding the cause of this conundrum.
It was during this time that they came to two conclusions. The first, that the "mottled enamel", as referred to by Dr. Black, was due developmental issues in a child's teeth. Meaning that those with permanent teeth that had come in without the stains would not likely develop those stains but those that were waiting for their permanent teeth to come in were at a higher risk. However, the second finding was strange. They found that despite the unsightly appearance of the stain, affected teeth were able to better withstand decay, or dental caries, than teeth without the stains.
The cause, however, was still a mystery.
It was not until some 30 years later that Dr. Mckay finally got the answer to this problem. It came about when he and Dr. Grover Kempf of the United States Public Health Service traveled to Bauxite, Arkansas, the company town of the then Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) to investigate more reports of the odd tooth staining. It was noted that the children of another town a few miles away, however, didn't have the same dental deformity. A few years prior, McKay had been able to confirm a theory that had to do with affected communities' drinking water when called to the Rocky Mountains to an Ohio family who reported the same issue of mottled, brown teeth in their children after the town had constructed a communal pipeline. The issue was resolved after he suggested the town use a different water source. So when arriving in Bauxite with Dr. Kempf they set to work on analyzing the town's water supply, hoping to find the culprit.
They could not, however.
So they published their findings and their report made it's way to the desk of ALCOA's lead chemist, H.V. Churchill, who would later go on to confirm Dr. McKay and Dr. Kempf's findings, and prove McKay's suspicions that there was something in the water causing the brown staining. In an effort to insure that the dental deformations were not a result of the company's aluminum operations and to thwart other reports that aluminum could be poisonous, he sent for samples of the water source in Bauxite and analyzed them with a new, more advanced method than what McKay had had available to him. After several retests, it was found that the water in Bauxite was tainted with fluoride.
Churchill then contacted McKay who collected samples from other affected areas and the results all came back the same: high levels of water borne fluoride.
High levels of fluoride in drinking water was now accepted to cause tooth enamel discoloration.
But what to do about it? And, other than the cosmetic effects, does the fact that it seems to strengthen teeth against decay mean that it could still be safe?
The answer in short, yes.
Shortly after, following the previous work of others before him, head of the Dental Hygiene Unit for the National Institute of Health, Dr. H. Trendley Dean, questioned how much fluoride could be present in drinking water so as to gain the anti-caries benefits but not so much as to cause fluorosis, or the discoloration of tooth enamel. He deferred to Dr. Elias Elvove to solve the problem of creating a method of measuring fluoride levels in water. After two years, Dr. Elvove was successful and with his team and new technique following, Dr. Dean crisscrossed the country to analyze various communities' water sources.
He and his team discovered that when fluoride levels were 1.0 ppm (parts per million), most people were not affected by enamel discoloration.
It wasn't until 1944, however, that the hypothesis of adding safe levels of fluoride to public drinking water was tested when the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan voted to try it and in the next year became the first city in the world to do so. For the next 15 years, the dental status of the approximate 30,000 school children in the city was meticulously monitored. It was announced that the studies findings confirmed what Dr. Dean had hypothesized-tooth decay rates in children born after fluoride was added to the city's water supply had decreased by more than 60%. With these findings, tooth decay had finally become one among the list of other preventable diseases.
In later years, and with the much more recent "trendy" attitude to be afraid of chemicals in our everyday lives (which, is a bit nonsensical, considering WE are even made of chemicals) fluoride was touted as possibly cancerous. After numerous studies, however, that "rumor" has been proven false. As for claims of ill effects with high concentrations in public drinking water, fluorosis is really all there is mentioned besides bone accumulation and, given that today (compared to when water fluoridation began) there are many foods and drinks (sodas, meats, fruits, etc) we consume that have moderate levels of fluoride in them, it's impossible to say that any one person can become exposed to "too much" just by a water supply alone as a population's water supply is carefully monitored and fluoride levels are restricted to that less than 1 ppm. But each water supply varies slightly, so it stands to reason that foods and drinks produced in a different location, utilizing a different water source, would vary in levels of fluoride.
So if you're at all concerned about the amount of fluoride you're ingesting in your diet, just pay attention to what you're putting in your body, but most importantly, how much. Everything in moderation. Eat well, stay hydrated and get as much rest as you can.
Oh and don't forget to brush your teeth.
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