A recent decision by several Australian federal politicians to support a parliamentary review of artificial water fluoridation has an intensified debate on the public health intervention. While there is a majority agreement among Australian dentists and other health professionals that adequate enamel fluoride is essential for dental health, the ethics of artificial fluoridation of public water ...

BACKGROUND The addition of the chemical fluorine to the water supply, called water fluoridation, reduces dental caries by making teeth more resistant to demineralisation and more likely to remineralise when initially decayed. This process has been implemented in more than 30 countries around the world, is cost-effective and has been shown to be efficacious in preventing decay across a person's ...

OBJECTIVE To describe public opinion relating to the fluoridation of drinking water in a sample of the Queensland population. METHOD Data were collected by means of a computer-assisted telephone interview survey from a sample of the Queensland population. Descriptive statistics and logistical regression were used to examine associations between variables. RESULTS Seventy per cent of the tot...

A recent decision by several Australian State politicians to support a parliamentary review of artificial water fluoridation has an intensified debate on the public health intervention. While there is a majority agreement among Australian dentists and other health professionals that adequate enamel fluoride is essential for dental health, the ethics of artificial fluoridation of public water su...

AIM This was to present a summary of the evidence from systematic reviews of the effectiveness and safety of water fluoridation. METHODS A search for relevant systematic reviews was conducted using the terms Fluoridation [Mesh] OR "water fluoridation" OR fluoridation OR (water AND fluoride) and was run from 01/01/2000 to 17/10/2008 in Pubmed, Embase, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Review...

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Water fluoridation is one of the methods for prevention of dental caries. The purpose of this study was to review water fluoridation in the world and in Iran, and its effectiveness in reported literature. METHODS: This paper is not a systematic review, but reviews the literature. “Water fluoridation” was used as a keyword for searching (electronic and hand search) in special...

BACKGROUND Fluoridation of public water supplies remains the key potential strategy for prevention of dental caries. The water supplies of many remote Indigenous communities do not contain adequate levels of natural fluoride. The small and dispersed nature of communities presents challenges for the provision of fluoridation infrastructure and until recently smaller settlements were considered u...

BACKGROUND There were some debates about the water fluoridation program in South Korea, even if the program had generally substantial effectiveness. Because the out-of-pocket expenditures for dental care were higher in South Korea than in other countries, an efficient solution was needed. Therefore, we examined the relationship between the implementation of water fluoridation and the utilizatio...

OBJECTIVES Increasingly, support for water fluoridation has come under attack. We seek an explanation, focusing on the case of Waterloo, Ontario, where a 2010 referendum overturned its water fluoridation program. In particular, we test whether individuals perceive the risks of water fluoridation based not on 'hard' scientific evidence but on heuristics and cultural norms. METHODS A sample of ...