Despite a valiant grassroots effort to get the city to change its fluoridated course,
Only [Sheffie] Kadane and Adam Medrano voted against the $1,060,800 contract with Mosaic Crop Nutrition to fluoridate Dallas’ water supply for the next three years.
Kadane tried to kill the deal. He insisted that “you ingest that fluid, you take it into your belly, you eliminate it,” so clearly fluoride in the water supply does nothing. “Unless you spread it on,” he insisted, “it’s not helping in any way shape or form.” Said Kadane, “Dental hygiene is the way to prevent cavities … it’s not by using flouride.”
Not to mention things like diet, exercise, sufficient rest and sleep, and all else that goes with making a healthful mouth, body and life.
Unfortunately, addressing those kinds of issues as a matter of public health is much more difficult, expensive and time-consuming than just adding fluoride to the water supply.
That aside, Kadane made an important point that often gets lost in the sometimes outrageous rhetoric thrown around this issue: Even if you accept that any topical benefit is worth the risks of regular ingestion, fluoridation is no “substitute for dental care”.
After all, even though more than 2/3 of the population have fluoridated water, youth tooth decay in this country continues to be described as an “epidemic.”
But though fluoridation remains Dallas policy for the time being, the fight for a fluoride-free future will, no doubt, continue.