Years before Calgary’s city council opted to remove fluoride from its water, members of the local government in Juneau made a similar decision.
Jennifer Meyer says she first became interested in studying the effects of lack of fluoridation in Juneau after moving there in 2015. At the time, she had two young children; a third was born in Juneau. She was surprised at how much dental work, including fillings, she noticed among many other preschool and elementary school children.
“I thought ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’ Because I could see a lot of the decay and the repairs,” Meyer says.
Juneau had stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water in 2007 after asking a six-member commission to review the evidence around fluoridation. A copy of the commission’s report obtained from Meyer, a public health researcher at the University of Alaska Anchorage, shows that two commission members opposed to fluoridation made claims about the health effects that Meyer says are “false” and “not grounded in quality investigations.”
The commission’s chair criticized anti-fluoride positions, at one point writing that part of the literature was based on “junk science.” But he ultimately recommended that the city stop fluoridation, claiming that the evidence about its safety at low concentrations was inconclusive. With the commission’s members split at 3–3, the
Juneau Assembly voted to end fluoridation.
Meyer and her colleagues analyzed Medicaid dental claims records made before and after the city stopped fluoridation. They found that the
average number of procedures to treat tooth decay rose in children under age 6, from 1.5 treatments per child in 2003 to 2.5 treatments per child in 2012.
The cost of these treatments in children under 6 years old, when adjusted for inflation, jumped by an average of $303 dollars per child from 2003 to 2012.
Meyer says that increased Medicaid costs for dental treatments ultimately end up being paid by taxpayers.
“When politicians decide to withhold a safe and effective public health intervention like fluoridation, they are imposing a hidden health care tax on everyone in their state or community,” Meyer says.
