Unsafe at Any Level

The great fluoride debate has raged for years, but recently anti-fluoridation rumblings have grown quite a bit louder. Last August, unions representing 7,000 scientists and other professionals who work at the Environ-mental Protection Agency (EPA) wrote to Congress asking for a moratorium on adding fluoride to water. They also wrote to the head of the EPA, urging the agency to cut the maximum level of fluoride allowed in tap water from four parts per million to zero.

At least one of the unions has been opposed to fluoridation for quite some time, but what prompted the others to join in was the strange case of Elise Bassin, a Harvard dental school PhD candidate who found a link between fluoridation and osteosarcoma, a fatal bone cancer. Her work lay mysteriously—some say suspiciously—buried for four years, while her professor denied that such a link existed.

Bassin’s study suggested that young boys (not girls though) were up to seven times as likely to develop osteosarcoma if they drank water fluoridated at government-recommended levels. Osteosarcoma is very rare overall—it occurs in just a handful of children per million each year. That’s no consolation if it’s your child, says Bill Hirzy, a chemist and the EPA unions’ point man on the fluoride issue. “The best outcome in osteosarcoma is amputation,” he says. “The other outcome is death.”

To the opponents of fluoridation, the osteosarcoma study is just one piece of scary evidence among many others. Half of ingested fluoride accumulates in bones, and the EPA’s current limit aims in part to protect against skeletal fluorosis, a bone disease caused by fluoride. The recent call for a change illustrates the fact that many EPA scientists believe the current limits don’t do enough to protect bones from fluoride’s potentially harmful effects.

One hope for a fresh, balanced analysis lies with a subcommittee of the prestigious National Research Council, which is due to complete a three-year study of the risks of fluoride this February. It’s the first time, fluoridation opponents say, that a major scientific review of the issue has included qualified people from both sides of the debate. Regardless of the
subcommittee reports, this controversy is not likely to go away.