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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

The dose makes the poison - there's a pretty dramatic correlation between low level fluoridation like the kind that's added to water and oral health, with not much at all linking it to health issues.

http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/fluorid.htm

http://www.nature.com/bdj/journal/v192/n9/full/4801410a.html

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I would not say that is dramatic or even meaningful. The findings are full of statements on how the the studies they considered were "of moderate quality, but of limited quantity". And they conclude with saying basically that they have no conclusion.

I think we may have read different studies. From the conclusions on the second link:

From the evidence available, it can be concluded that fluoridation of public water supplies does prevent caries and is associated with fluorosis.

Personally speaking, I'd call 15-25% reductions "dramatic".

From the summary: "The authors were surprised by the small amount of work identified. In particular, there were very few studies that followed the same individuals longitudinally, there was lack of analysis of confounding variables and there was failure to undertake appropriate statistical analysis."

The whole report has a tone of being the best they could conclude with poor data which is stressed repeatedly. Those numbers put in context of the opinions of the source data makes them not so impressive.

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