Bantry isn’t ‘fluoride-free’

I disagree with the campaign to cease fluoridation of drinking water in Ireland and the recent declaration of Bantry as a ‘fluoride-free’ town.

Bantry is not fluoride-free. A few businesses serving fluoride-free water don’t constitute fluoride-free. Thankfully, for our dental health, the public water is still fluoridated.

The argument to cease fluoridation is neither based on science nor rational argument. Fluoridation of water adds fluoride in the form of the fluoride-containing compound, hydrofluosilicic acid.

This compound is a primary product, and not sourced as a byproduct of fertiliser production, as some campaigners might have us think.

Fluoride is added at a concentration less than half the EU recommended maximum. Even allowing for a tiny amount naturally occurring in groundwater, and the small amount in some toothpastes, the levels are way below anything that would be detrimental to health. However, these levels do give optimum protection against dental decay. Dental decay occurs much more widely in parts of the UK, and in other countries that do not fluoridate their water. In Ireland, where we consume unsafe levels of fizzy drinks, sweets, etc, fluoride in toothpaste is not enough to prevent tooth decay. Cessation of water fluoridation will result in significantly elevated levels of tooth decay.

Skeletal flourisis, the most detrimental health effect of excessive fluoride, does not occur in this country. Fluoride, despite claims, does not cause cancer, and does not damage reproductive capability. The most recent studies preformed by the EU, in 2012, and the expert body in this country found no evidence that fluoridation was a risk to human health.

As for people who argue that they have no choice in whether or not their water is fluoridated, should we stop adding vitamin D to milk or folic acid to cereals? The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention called fluoridation ‘one of the top ten public health interventions of the 20th century’. Let’s not risk our dental health, and that of our children, based on an argument that dismisses the overwhelming body of scientific data that proves it’s safe.

Dan Lettice

Clonakilty

Co Cork