The use of fluoride in public water systems has provided improved dental health to the people who draw their water from those systems.
That much has been proven by study, and there is general agreement among those who are physicians and dentists and others in the health community that the use of fluoride is good public policy.
But if it’s good policy to have fluoride in our drinking water, might it also be good policy to add other components and brews that might, for example, improve our calcium composition, or our intake of Vitamin D, or some other generally accepted and agreed upon healthy outcome?
That’s exactly what’s happening with our food. Biotechnology is allowing agriculture and chemical companies the opportunity to grow and produce vitamin-enriched crops… foods with increased doses of natural components to can help to cure whatever ails you. There’s even a name for it: Pharming.
And so why not further enrich our public water supplies if we have that opportunity? We live in a world where that is very possible.
That’s part of the reason why local populations should continue to be given the opportunity to determine if they want fluoride — or anything else — in their public water supply.
The Board of Health for Chatham-Kent decided this week to support a resolution from their counterpart in Simcoe Muskoka that the decision to fluoridate be vested with the province. The Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit says “a substantial number of municipalities in Ontario have discontinued community water fluoridation; over the last five years, this loss has affected almost half a million people, or almost 4% of Ontario’s population.”
Simcoe Muskoka believes that the question of fluoridation is too important to be left with local municipal councils, which now have that responsibility through the Fluoridation Act.
They further suggest that the job of defending water fluoridation at the local level consumes too many public health resources …”and too often ends in a loss of community water fluoridation.”
Their argument suggests it would be more efficient to have Queen’s Park decide this issue, but this issue shouldn’t be about administrative efficiency. It should be about local people deciding what they want in their water and what they don’t want.