The aim of this work was to determine the natural fluoride concentrations in public water supplies in Piauí State, Brazil, in order to identify cities in risk for high prevalence of dental fluorosis. For each city, two samples of drinking water were collected in the urban area: one from the main public water supply and another from a public or residential tap from the same source. Fluoride anal...

This paper reviews the scientific events culminating in the fluoridation of communal water supplies. Dental and medical studies completed by 1942 had established the safety and benefits of exposure to drinking water naturally containing fluoride. Researchers and public health workers concluded that it was possible to test the hypothesis that the dental benefits attained where fluoride levels ar...

Sir, Ludlow et al. [1] only confirmed that our knowledge of the potential adverse effects of chronic low fluoride supplementation of drinking water on normal or diseased kidneys is insufficient. More than 60 years after water fluoridation, there is no high-level evidence as most published studies are small, have methological deficiencies or are otherwise flawed. There are two areas of concern r...

Background: Waning controversy over fluoride and water fluoridation is rekindling with the findings released from certain fluoride studies which reported an inverse association between fluoride exposure and intelligence. Objective: To assess the relationship between exposure to different drinking water fluoride levels and children's Intelligence Quotient (IQ) among 13-15 year old school childre...

Dental fluorosis refers to changes in the appearance of tooth enamel that are caused by long-term ingestion of fluoride during the time teeth are forming. Studies conducted in the 1930s showed that the severity of tooth decay was lower and dental fluorosis was higher in areas with more fluoride in the drinking water. In response to these findings, community water fluoridation programs were deve...

The well being of human depends on quality of drinking water. Consumption of water containing excess fluoride over a long period of time results in fluorosis. Ramaraju et al., (2000). Investigations of Wood, (1974) showed that, the intake of fluoride is permissible upto 0.5-1.0 mg/L which is beneficial to human health. The maximum allowable concentration for fluoride in drinking water in Indian...

In 1983, Wilkinson (5) acknowledged that: ‘If the claim presented in court was correct, then fluoride in water would present a hazard to health as those drinking the water would be at risk from bacterial infections.’ He studied the effect of NaF on the locomotion and chemotaxis of human neutrophils and monocytes, using a microphore filter assay and a time-lapse photographic assay, and found tha...

There is much that we know about fluoride as it relates to human health in general and dental health in particular. Some of the information that is known concerning water fluoridation and dental fluorosis is listed. What we do not know about fluoride is discussed in more detail, namely the efficacy of lower levels of fluoride in drinking water, the effect of discontinuing fluoride in drinking w...