Comment by tashar

Well I mean the flip side is... does community water fluorination at its current levels actually help?

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

The Cochrane Collaboration's research is near the gold standard, and yet they find surprisingly limited evidence of benefit for CWF in the modern research:

"These low‐certainty findings (a 4 percentage point difference and 3 percentage point difference for primary and permanent dentition, respectively) favoured CWF."

3-4% reduction in cavities is not nothing, but it's a far cry from the 60% drop observed in the 1940s and certainly much less than what I think most strong proponents of water fluoridation would have you believe. The ongoing discussion I find quite legitimate given we're no longer living in the 1940s and CWF seems to have a substantially lower benefit than it once did, and likewise we do notice a concerning trend with fluorine neurotoxicity that has only emerged in the last few decades of research.

Public health policy is all about a risk/benefit analysis, and CWF is one of those topics that I feel legitimately should be discussed because much has changed over the many decades since the US first introduced it and since then the risks seemingly have gone up and the benefit has astronomically gone down.

Again, I do not think there'd be much discussion if current water fluorination was at 0.15mg/L, and we started seeing a negative trend at 1.5mg/L. But I don't think its actually at all unreasonable for public health officials to be worried and possibly start considering alternatives to CWF out of an abundance of caution.