ADDITION OF FLUORIDE TO MILK IMPRACTICABLE

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28823, 18 February 1959, Page 14

ADDITION OF FLUORIDE TO MILK IMPRACTICABLE

"Th« Press** Special Service

DUNEDIN, Feb. 17.

Machinery is available for adding fluoride to water supplies with accuracy and safety. With milk, however, it would be necessary to add fluoride in relatively small quantities, and each batch would have to be tested under proper laboratory conditions. This was the answer given by Dr. G. N. Davies, head of the department of preventive, public health and. children’s dentistry at the University of Otago Dental School, when asked to comment on a -suggestion by a Dunedin doctor that fluoride could be added to milk more selectively than to water.

Technical evidence on the use of milk as a vehicle for the application of fluoride was given before the Commission of Inquiry by several • people,, including Dr. Muriel Bell and the dean of the School of Home Science, Dr. Elizabeth Gregory, said Dr. Davies.

Some of Dr. Davies’s specific comments on the use of fluoridated school milk are:

“To get the maximum benefit from fluoride, it is essential not only to ensure that fully formed teeth are in dally contact with fluoride, but also to ensure that fluoride is taken daily while the teeth are forming. For best results, children should take fluoride continuously from birth, not just from the age of five, when they go to school. “It has been established that when .drinking water' contains one part a million ’ of fluoride the physiological need for water ensures that children and adults receive the. requisite ambnnt of fluoride. For example, infants who take less water than older children receive less fluoride.

“But if we had to depend upon fluoridated milk we should have to have milk with different amounts of fluoride, since we should have to avoid giving too much to Infants who live largely on milk, or too little to older children, .who drink less milk. Dr. Muriel Bell, head of the nutrition research department at the University of Otego Medical School, said that less milk was taken by the toddler than by the nine-month-old baby, and there were children who developed an aversion to milk or did not take it at all.

There were technological difficulties in adding fluoride to each tank of/ milk at the treatment station. “It cannot be added as a liquid because the addition ot water would undo all the good work that has gone Into preventing such a practice.” she said. “If it is added as a solid it precipitates protein. Just how is it going to be added and mixed in a stationary tank?"