New Study Backs Fluoridation

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30682, 23 February 1965, Page 13

New Study Backs Fluoridation

(Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.)

LONDON, February 22.

A new study of the effects of sodium fluoride in drinking water has shown results opposed to earlier findings, according to the “British Medical Journal.”

In 1963 a report from Oxford, published in the journal purported to show that quantities of sodium fluoride equivalent to those recommended for use in drinking water had a deleterious effect upon certain types of mammalian cells grown in tissue culture.

The report was received with considerable reserve in medical and scientific circles but was exploited to the full by the opponents of fluoridation.

Now, workers from the University of Minnesota Medical School give details of a careful study repeating and amplifying the work of the Oxford investigators. In this they show that the addition of sodium fluoride up to 10 parts per million had no effect on the growth of cells in tissue culture.

This is well above the highest level that fluoride can reach in the fluids of the body even when the drinking water contains as much as five to six parts per million of fluoride.

In other words, their results “do not impugn the

safety of use of properly fluoridated water.”

This conclusion, they note, is confirmed by other recent investigations, including a report from the United States published in “Nature” last summer, in which the author concluded that his findings were “in agreement with those findings which indicate that 1 to 1.2 parts per million fluoride in the drinking water will produce no adverse effects.”