Hi readers!
Alex Viveros, on April 28, 2025, reported in News “Health & Medicine” that children in the cities who stopped adding fluoride to drinking water, experience more tooth decay than otherwise. Warn Loeppky: A pediatric dentist in the Canadian city of Calgary says, “tooth decay in children living in non-fluorinated areas has become more common, more aggressive and more severe to the extent that many of his young patients have to be treated under general anesthesia”.
He further said, “that many factors can contribute to tooth decay in children including their diet and genetics but, he believes that part of the problem is linked to a decision made by local government in 2011, when Calgary stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water.
“The decision was surprising for general public, but shocking and alarming for dentists, pediatricians, anesthesiologists and others in the health care field, who knew what it would mean,”
Juliet Guichon: a legal and ethics scholar at the University of Calgary formed a group that advocated adding fluoride back to drinking water in the city because:
Studies have shown that fluoride is a safe and effective way to prevent tooth decay as it recruits minerals like calcium and phosphate, to strengthen tooth enamel and fend off acid made by bacteria.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention recommends that communities across the country should add 0.7 milligrams of fluoride for every liter of water. In 2022, CDC reported that 63 percent of Americans have been receiving fluoridated water now, but that practice is under new scrutiny. In March 2025, Utah became the first state to ban fluoridation while many local governments are also debating the issue. On April 7th, 2025, Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services told the news that he planned to tell the CDC to stop its recommendation.
The opponent of adding fluoride to water has been contesting in the United States and have voiced health concerns including tooth staining and disproven worries that fluoridated water could cause bone cancer. Besides, it amounts to mass medication and violates individual freedoms.
People have also pointed to the research showing association between fluoride and lowered IQ in children, but the findings have been heavily criticized while looking at fluoride concentrations much higher than those found in most Americans’ drinking water.
What happened in Calgary and Alaska: the two states who stopped water fluoridation in 2007 is worth consideration. Lindsay McLaren of Science News, who is also a quantitative social scientist at the University of Calgary after speaking with researchers and other experts in both cities says, “while looking into the mouths of second grade children in Calgary, she never anticipated she would become a self-described fluoridation researcher. The observation prompted McLaren to design a study looking at how the dental health of the city’s children managed once fluoride was removed.
She recruited dental hygienists to go to schools and inspect the mouths of second-grade students. Some went to schools in Calgary and others to Edmonton: a city in the same province that still fluoridated its water.
In Calgary, the team surveyed 2,649 second graders around seven years after fluoridation ended, meaning thereby that they had never been exposed to fluoride in their drinking water. Of those, 65 percent had tooth decay and In Edmonton, 55 percent of surveyed children had tooth decay. While the percentages may seem close, they mark a statistically significant difference that McLaren calls “quite large” on the population level.
Compared to Edmonton, dental health of Calgary kids was considerably worse.” Other factors, including diet and socioeconomic status, did not explain the differences between children in Edmonton and Calgary, she says.
In 2024, another study found a higher rate of tooth decay-related treatments for which a child was placed under general anesthesia in Calgary than in Edmonton. From 2018 to 2019, 32 out of every 10,000 children in Calgary were put under general anesthesia to treat tooth decay, compared with 17 for every 10,000 children in Edmonton.
The findings didn’t surprise local dentists, says Bruce Yaholnitsky, a periodontist in Calgary. “This is just obvious to us. But you need to have proper science to prove, the obvious”
Did you understand dear readers how important children’s health is to those who mater in the west compared to those in our society? We don’t care about the health of our elderly people, what to talk about children who keep roaming around bare footed with either a shirt in or a knicker only? Optics are more important than health. What do you think? Give me a break please.
See you next week.
Take care, Bye
