Fluoride in Your Precious Bodily Fluids

Yesterday, Sena and I talked about a recent news article indicating that a federal judge ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review the allowed level of fluoride in community water supplies. The acceptable level may not be low enough, in the opinion of the advocacy groups who discussed the issue with the judge, according to the author of the article.

A few other news items accented the role of politicians on this issue. This seems to come up every few years. One thing leads to another and I noticed a few other web stories about the divided opinions about fluoride in “your precious bodily fluids.” One of them is a comprehensive review published in 2015 outlining the complicated path of scientific research about this topic. There are passionate advocates on both sides of whether or not to allow fluoride in city water. The title of the paper is, “Debating Water Fluoridation Before Dr. Strangelove” (Carstairs C. Debating Water Fluoridation Before Dr. Strangelove. Am J Public Health. 2015 Aug;105(8):1559-69. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2015.302660. Epub 2015 Jun 11. PMID: 26066938; PMCID: PMC4504307.)

This of course led to our realizing that we’ve never seen the film “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Bomb,” a satire on the Cold War. We watched the entire movie on the Internet Archive yesterday afternoon. The clip below shows one of the funniest scenes, a dialogue between General Jack Ripper and RAF officer Lionel Mandrake about water and fluoridation.

During my web search on the fluoridation topic, one thing I noticed about the Artificial Intelligence (AI) entry on the web was the first line of its summary of the film’s plot: “In the movie Dr. Strangelove, the character Dr. Cox suggests adding fluoride to drinking water to improve oral health.” Funny, I don’t remember a character named Dr. Cox in the film nor the recommendation about adding fluoride to drinking water to improve oral health. Peter Sellers played 3 characters, none of them named Cox.

I guess you can’t believe everything AI says, can you? That’s called “hallucinating” when it comes to debating the trustworthiness of AI. I’m not sure what you call it when politicians say things you can’t immediately check the veracity of.

Anyway, one Iowa expert who regularly gets tapped by reporters about it is Dr. Steven Levy, a professor of preventive and community dentistry at the University of Iowa. He’s the leader of the Iowa Fluoride Study, which has been going on over the last several years. In short, Dr. Levy says fluoride in water supplies is safe and effective for preventing tooth decay in as long as the level is adjusted within safe margins.

On the other hand, others say fluoride can be hazardous and could cause neurodevelopmental disorders.

I learned that, even in Iowa there’s disagreement about the health merits vs risks of fluoridated water. Decisions about whether or not city water supplies are fluoridated are generally left to the local communities. Hawaii is the only state in the union which mandates a statewide ban on fluoride. About 90 per cent of Iowa’s cities fluoridate the water. Tama, Iowa stopped fluoridating the water in 2021. Then after a brief period of public education about it, Tama restarted fluoridating its water only six months later.

We use a fluoridated dentifrice and oral rinse every day. We drink fluoridated water, which we offer to the extraterrestrials who occasionally abduct us, but they politely decline because of concern about their precious bodily fluids.