Despite an impassioned plea from a Prince Albert resident backed by a Canadian medical scholar, the city is cleared to resume the fluoridation of its drinking water.
Local health advocate Maureen Logue first brought the issue to city council about a year ago, around the same time the city stopped injecting fluoride into its drinking water due to ongoing renovations.
With fluoridation set to re-commence in about a week’s time, Logue made one final plea for city council to reconsider their fluoridation policy during Monday’s city council meeting.
“It’s unethical to enforce a drug, because fluoride is not a nutrient,” she said. “If people, through their own choice, want to fluoridate, we have so many sources of fluoridation.”
By international law, it’s illegal to dump fluoride in oceans, she said -- “and we’re drinking it!”
Logue backed her argument with a number of points University of Calgary medical biophysics Prof. James Beck provided her.
Beck co-authored the book, “The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There.”
Although fluoride may be beneficial when applied topically, fluoride in drinking water is ingested -- something Beck notes in his research as carrying potentially harmful side effects such as dental fluorosis.
Even its alleged positive effects were questioned by Logue, who noted, citing literature by Beck, that “dental cavities for various reasons have gone down all over the world … In non-fluoridated communities, it has gone down just as much or (more) than fluoridated.”
In a letter to city council, Beck listed various adverse health effects linked to fluoride, including lower IQs in children, early onset of menstruation, low sperm counts and adversely affecting the kidneys, among other things.
Providing a pro-fluoride stance, College of Dental Surgeons of Saskatchewan executive director Jerod Orb also spoke during Monday’s meeting.
In Canada, about 45 per cent of communities have fluoridated water -- its benefits obvious to citizens that have it, he asserted.
“It reduces tooth decay anywhere from 18 to 40 per cent,” he said. “That is why we see our long-term care facilities more and more full of seniors with their natural teeth.”
Saskatoon fluoridates its water and Regina doesn’t, he said, noting that a 2009 study cited twice as many cavities in Regina kids.
(Fluoride) reduces tooth decay anywhere from 18 to 40 per cent ... That is why we see our long-term care facilities more and more full of seniors with their natural teeth. - College of Dental Surgeons of Saskatchewan executive director Jerod Orb
“It’s proven to be safe,” he concluded. “At the recommended levels it’s safe -- excessive, it isn’t.”
In Prince Albert, the naturally occurring fluoride is topped up to 0.7 parts per million, which is shy of the country’s maximum acceptable concentration of 1.5.
Backing Orb’s pro-fluoride stance, Prince Albert Parkland Health Region dental health educator Dwight Krauss said that fluoridation is free because “it benefits the entire spectrum of the population.”
“It’s a huge benefit. The costs of getting restorations done -- I think everyone’s aware of that.”
When it comes to dental fluorosis, Krauss handed a chart to the city’s elected officials highlighting its prevalence. Although 40.3 per cent of the population has questionable to mild levels of dental fluorosis, it may actually make the tooth more resistant to decay, his handout reads.
Only 0.3 per cent of the population has severe dental fluorosis, which is likely caused by additional outside factors, he said after his presentation.
After hearing both sides of the debate and considering correspondence from a few additional sources that outlined numerous additional arguments, Mayor Greg Dionne told council that now is the time to make a decision.
“It’s a no-win situation,” he said. “The yeas have all their facts in line, the nays have all their facts in line.”
With the only dissenting comment from council coming from Coun. Ted Zurakowski, who noted that the city would save money by not injecting fluoride, council voted in favour of fluoridation.
City public works director Colin Innes confirmed that after more than a year of being offline, the city’s new fluoridation equipment is almost good to go.
“It’s either very close to us being able to feed, already, or that we’re within a week or so of being able to do it.”
Questioning much of what was presented to the city’s elected officials, Logue said after the meeting that she’s not done addressing the fluoridation issue, and plans on remaining in contact with Beck to plan the next course of action.
With fluoride injection set to recommence within the next week, she wants to warn the public -- particularly the most vulnerable, such as people with babies -- that not all professionals agree that it’s safe.
"The studies that site fluoride as dangerous" is not what fluoridation "cessationists" are claiming. 1. Our claim is that chronic ingestion causes adverse health effects that are now proven. 2. Our claim is that fluoridation produces more than just dental fluorosis. 3. Our claim is that dental fluorosis is more than just a cosmetic effect while dental fluorosis is incontestable and ADA/CDC officially reported effect of chronic (long term) fluoride exposure. 4. Our claim is that Fluoride in the water supply is a known protoplasmic poison and that it causes harm to the health of everyone at lower doses than has ever been acknowledged or recognized. 5. Our claim is that it is a drug because promoters and supporters say that it is so by virtue of the fact that it is put in the water supply to treat tooth decay and not to treaty the water. 6. Our claim is that everyone gets treated for a condition for which no benefit can be derived as represented by its very promoters and supporters 7. Our claim is that everyone gets medicated without their explicit consent and often without their knowledge and without any medical supervision or follow up 8. Our claim is that knowledge of adverse effects and non performance have been suppressed for ulterior motives unrelated to tooth decay 9. 7. Our claim is that mass medication of this nature is unethical, immoral and unlawful. 10. Our claim is that fluoridation is still experimental because there are still no clinical trials or animal studies for ingestion of fluoridated water using a toxic fluoride industrial waste chemical. 11. Our claim is that this continuing experimenting on people is against the Nuremberg code signed by Canada after WW2. 12. Our claim is that illnesses and deaths are needlessly aggravated and caused by artificial water fluoridation It's high time more truth comes out about this ill advised health practice. Here's one more item to add to the suppressed knowledge that has come to light over the years. The Journal of the American Medical Association, Sept 18, 1943, editorial, said: “Fluorides are general protoplasmic poisons.” This concurs with an earlier declaration contained in another professional Journal. The Journal of the American Dental Association, Volume 23, page 568, April, 1936, titled "Fluorine in relation to bone and tooth development" by Floyd DeEds, Phd, - where that previous statement corroborated this research. So, what happened since then? Fluoride hasn't changed. Social engineering of our perceptions is what's changed. Social engineering has made us accept it as if it was NOT harmful when it really IS harmful... in 1951, H.T. Dean, then Director of the National Institute of health confirmed before a U.S.Congressional Hearing, that fluoridation was experimental: We set up a hypothesis, a dental caries fluorine hypothesis, and obviously the next step in scientific procedure would be to subject this hypothesis to *experimental* verification by adding fluoride to a fluoride-free water, and it is purely experimental verification of the hypothesis. This experimentation was done on people after the U.S. was a know signatory to the prohibition on human experimentation at Nuremberg!