We’re not exactly sure why a fluoride pump that broke three years ago has only now become news in Corpus Christi, but become news it has.
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According to the city’s Water Quality Manager, “the city hopes to have a new system installed in about two years.” Until then, no added fluoride.
And if city officials read the new paper from the Cochrane Collaboration’s Oral Health Group, they just might want to keep things that way. It’s bottom line message, as trumpeted by Newsweek
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Reviewing 155 studies on fluoridation, caries and fluorosis, the group found “very little contemporary evidence” for the effectiveness of fluoridation in preventing caries. As explained in the plain language summary of the review,
Data suggest that the introduction of water fluoridation resulted in a 35% reduction in decayed, missing or filled baby teeth and a 26% reduction in decayed, missing or filled permanent teeth. It also increased the percentage of children with no decay by 15%. Although these results indicate that water fluoridation is effective at reducing levels of tooth decay in children’s baby and permanent teeth, the applicability of the results to current lifestyles is unclear because the majority of the studies were conducted before fluoride toothpastes and the other preventative measures were widely used in many communities around the world.
There was insufficient information available to find out whether the introduction of a water fluoridation programme changed existing differences in tooth decay across socioeconomic groups.
There was insufficient information available to understand the effect of stopping water fluoridation programmes on tooth decay.
No studies met the review’s inclusion criteria that investigated the effectiveness of water fluoridation for preventing tooth decay in adults, rather than children. [emphasis added]
We imagine the good people of Corpus Christi have many other things they’d rather buy instead of a new fluoride pump.
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