City restarts process to consider adding fluoride to water
Four years after shelving the project due to the COVID -19 pandemic, the city is to look at adding fluoride to the municipal water supply.
Council on Tuesday night voted 11-1 in favour of a motion that would restart the process.
“I think this is a really important public health issue that we have not resolved and it is overdue that we do that,” Sydenham District Coun. Conny Glenn, who brought the motion forward, said.
It wasn't a unanimous vote despite delegations from the local medical community that pointed to its proven value to dental health, especially among children.
“I see health equity in the mouths of my patients all the time,” said Susan Phillips, a family doctor in Kingston who grew up in Toronto but moved out of the city before fluoridation began there.
She said the benefits of fluoride in the water were clear to see when she returned to Toronto.
“This isn't a scientific study of course, it's an observation of one family doc — me — who was amazed that after 20 years of fluoridated water in Toronto, cavities had all but disappeared,” she said.
When she moved to Kingston in 1989, Phillips said she was surprised to find out the water here is not fluoridated and it is likely most people are not aware of the absence of fluoride.
Adding fluoride to drinking water is one of the simplest and most effective ways improve dental health, particularly among poorer populations.
“When fluoride is added to municipal drinking water, poor children benefit disproportionally,” Philips said.
About 10 million people in Ontario — almost three-quarters of the province's population — live in communities where fluoride is added to municipal water systems.
Harvard-trained pediatric dentist Jennifer Archibald of Kingston, who has previously worked in Detroit, Boston, Toronto and London, said when compared to areas with water fluoridation, it's obvious that Kingston is lacking.
“I'm finding that the rates of cavities here are the highest among any of the children or adults I have treated,” said Archibald, who said her wait list for treatment is up to six months.
Adding fluoride to the water is the most cost-effective way of providing a layer of protection against tooth decay and infections and other complications that can result from cavities, said Piotr Oglaza, medical officer of health with Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox and Addington Public Health.
Fluoride occurs naturally in local Lake Ontario water but only at about 0.1 milligrams per litre. To be effective, a fluoridation program would have to increase that amount to 0.7 milligrams per litre, Oglaza said.
“This number is set by Health Canada and undergoes continuous review,” he said. “Adjusting fluoride levels in water is similar to fortifying foods.”
Studies suggest that every dollar spent on water fluoridation saves up to $42 in cost to the health-care system, and Oglaza said no widely respected health or dental association opposes water fluoridation.
“There is no change in behaviour needed to gain benefit,” he said. “It is accessible to all, a truly universal way to help everyone.”
Oglaza said opinion polls in Kingston showed about 18.5 per cent of respondents were opposed to adding fluoride to the local water.
Tuesday's motion only asked city staff to present information about the cost and timetable for implementing a fluoridation program, but there were some voices of dissent.
Resident Marion Gilmore said fluoride was a toxic byproduct of aluminum manufacturing about 100 years ago, and that adding it to the water supply was devised as a way of disposing of it.
Gilmore questioned fluoride's value in cavity prevention.
“There has never been a single double-blind study to indicate that fluoridation is effective at reducing cavities. Not one,” she said.
Countryside District Coun. Gary Oosterhof, the lone dissenting councillor, also questioned the safety of adding fluoride to the water and said to do so would force people to take a medication they may not want.
“It's a violation of our individual rights to informed consent for medication,” he said.
Oosterhof called fluoride one of the “most toxic chemicals on the planet.”
“Just a couple of weeks ago we talked about all the chemicals in the Inner Harbour. Now we are talking about the even worse chemicals we are going to add to our water,” he said.
“There is science about how fluoride interacts with other chemicals that should concern us,” he said. “There are a lot of health risks. I believe I would completely differ from our professionals. There is a lot of science.”
“There is good science and there is bad science. There are what people call facts that are opinions,” Glenn countered. “Science needs to be peer-reviewed.”
The staff report, much of which was to be presented to council in late March 2020 before it was derailed by the pandemic, is to be put before council at a special council meeting prior to the end of the year.