Natural fluoride isn’t quite enough
By Ben Harder
From Philadelphia, Pa., at a meeting of the American Public Health Association
The reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 has had some consequences for dental health, researchers have found.
Decades ago, health officials in many countries, including East Germany, added fluoride to public water sources to reduce tooth decay. After Germany reunified in 1990, however, the country’s eastern states suspended fluoridation, which hadn’t caught on with their western counterparts.
To test how natural variations in the amount of fluoride in water influenced dental health in their country, Gudrun Beyer and Joachim Kugler of Dresden Medical School analyzed the frequencies of common dental problems in 46,875 school children in the eastern German state of Saxony. They also determined the average background fluoride concentration in drinking water in each of the state’s 29 districts. For most districts, the natural fluoride concentration was between 0.1 and 0.4 milligram per liter, well below the 1 mg/l concentration mandated by these districts before reunification.