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‘Water May Need More Than Fluoridation’

(Netv Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, May 3.

City water supplies of the future might well require more than fluoridation to give everybody, or nearly everybody, immunity from tooth-rot, according to Dr. Richard R. Stephens, head of the Department of Children’s Dentistry at the Eastman Dental Hospital’s Institute of Dental Surgery, London.

Dr. Stephens is in New Zealand at the invitation of the New Zealand Dental Association to lecture to dentists and students of dentistry. Dr. Stephens said there was growing belief that the cause of dental decay would be found 1, not in the tooth but

in the saliva, and that a trace element missing in, say, the soil of New Zealand, would be added to drinking water. The human body had is own built-in system of defences. Thus, when dust entered the eyes, tears flushed out the dust and countered possible infection with an anti-biotic. Much research remained to be done, but it might well be proved that saliva contained an ingredient which, in the lucky minority totally immune to dental decay, protected the teeth.

It might be found that Stone Age man’s saliva gave him total immunity but that saliva had not caught up with bis-cuiting-eating, sweets and other inducers of decay.

“If this is found to be the case,” Dr. Stephens said, “people will. be able to eat with immunity all the lollies and all the biscuits they like. “In the meantime it is the

duty of parents to do all they can to prevent that tragic spectacle with which I am all too familiar —a child under five undergoing general anaesthetic for extraction of several rotted teeth. “For parents, I can only restate the old rules: avoid such tooth-killing practices as loading the baby’s last bottle at night with sugar (a sadly common practice back home), do not get hooked by advertisements for some vitamin preparations which deposit sugary deposits around children’s teeth, and do not let your children get hooked by long-lasting lollies—barleysugar, acid drops and the like,” he said.

His two children, of 11 and 9, had no holes in their teeth. They had given them fluoride tablets intermittently —a measure of non-obsession —with their cornflakes, said Dr. Stephens.

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Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19650504.2.217

Bibliographic details

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30741, 4 May 1965, Page 20

Word Count
371

‘Water May Need More Than Fluoridation’ Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30741, 4 May 1965, Page 20

‘Water May Need More Than Fluoridation’ Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30741, 4 May 1965, Page 20