Don’t Be Fooled: Use Your Brain

As I have mentioned time and time again, the process of adding fluoride to a community’s drinking water is very controversial. Not surprisingly, there has been research done to help sway the public and committees one way or the other. It is important to question the authors when reading through the studies, articles and other gathered other information. Many of the documents will be written by a person working for, or donating to, one specific side of the debate. The articles and studies are meant to be persuasive, so they will be presented with this in mind. Studies can be conducted from an uneven population distribution which can alter the results, or information that is not positive for their debate can easily go unmentioned. Keep these things in mind and don’t suppress your speculations. Research both sides of the debate to make the most educated decision for both you and your community.

An article was published just a few weeks ago detailing why Martin County delayed their decision to add fluorine to their water systems. The county had all the details on how to execute the implementation of fluoridization. By January or February of next year, fluorine would be added to the community water supply, as soon as the plant, Tropical Farms, was complete. The state has already issued a grant for $127,500 to implement the process. When the commissioners met a few weeks back, they came to the conclusion that the information they were provided with to make a decision was inadequate. They voted to postpone their decision until further research was gathered to analyze. The commissioners want to gather more information on the benefits or risks of the artificial fluoridization process. They were provided with a study done by the National Research Council that concluded high doses of fluorine, 4 milligrams per liter or higher, proved to have health risks in consumer’s bones. The commissioners noted that the amount of fluorine that would be added to the community’s water would be much lower than what was used in their study, and they would be staying within the regulations of 0.7 to 1.2 milligrams per liter. The research conclusions were insignificant to the case at hand because they were reviewing totally different standards. Like it is often concluded, too much of a good thing isn’t always the best. It is not surprising that the research team found the results that they did, because many other research projects with the same conditions had similar results.

It seems that the commissioners of Martin County made the best decision that they could: to wait. More information was needed for them to make a decision that affects the entire community. Had they rushed into the situation and voted without adequate information from unbiased sources, the results could have been detrimental to the community and they would have been partly to blame. I applaud the commissioners for their courtesy to the public, and for using their intuition. They realized that the facts they were presented with were not applicable to the situation they were going in to. The beginning of the article stated that the research conducted by the Congressional Research Service is a part of the US Congress research team that provides unbiased research. This team of researchers would be credible, while the one stated in the article, National Research Council, was presented without any details of their stance on the debate, or who was paying for the research they conducted. In all, I urge you to be aware of what you read, and continually question the credibility of the source, as that could change all of the results.