FLUORINE’S EFFECT ON TEETH

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume VLI, Issue 3420, 16 December 1935, Page 5

FLUORINE’S EFFECT ON TEETH

DELETERIOUS ACTION WELLINGTON DENTIST’S INQUIRIES. Why have New Zealanders such bad teeth? That question still puzzles specialists. During the past six years, however, discoveries made by researchers in South Africa, the United States and Britain have revealed that great harm is being done by very small traces of fluorine in water and other matter consumed by human being and by stock. Fluorine is a gaseous element occurring in nature in rocks and combining in various forms. It is of a greenish hue and has a destructive effect upon metals. It was isolated first in 1886. The connection between fluorine and mottled teeth was proved experimentally in 1931.

Authorities have agreed that appreciable amounts of fluorine appear to be found in volcanic country in other parts of the world, at least. Four or five parts per million of fluorine in water have been proved to have a very deleterious effect on the teeth of school children and on the bone formation, so that, water traces of fluorine having been consumed during the development of the child, once the teeth break through the gums, the mottling cannot be remedied. Experiments are being made by a Wellington dental surgeon to ascertain the effect on rats of various kinds of rock and other phosphate given in small rations in the diet. Investigations in other countries during the past six years have proved that fluorine in small amounts as an impurity in raw rock phosphates* and superphosphate is capable of causing serious dental decay and bone abnormalities, such as thickening of the jaws, when the phosphates are given alone or in place of bone meal or bone char in supplementary 'mineral licks fed to farm animals. N.Z. Analyses Wrong. The latest chemical analyses of the United States of America Department of Agriculture revealed that New Zealand authorities probably are wrong in saying that Nauru and Ocean Island phosphates contain practically no fluorine in comparison with Florida and North African phosphates. The American chemists recently found samples of Ocean and Nauru phosphate to contain 2.97 and 2.62 per cent, respectively of fluorine. Applied to pasture, it may be that such small quantities of phosphatic rock might not exert harmful influence on animal nutrition, but long continued feeding of phosphatic elements probably would produce manifestly deleterious effects in the teeth and bony framework of stock. A recent five-year mineral feeding investigation in Michigan, United States, shows conclusively that fluorine content of rock phosphates alone, or in other cattle licks, causes grave abnormality in the osseus character of cattle. Stir in England. A stir was caused in England just over a year ago when N. J. Ainsworth, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., read a paper on “the clinical significance of traces fluorides in water,” before the Society of Public Analysts in England. He found mottled teeth among Essex school children in areas where water contained 4.5 to 5.5 parts per million of fluorine. Mr Ainsworth’s paper caused great interest and discussion, and several points of great moment were disclosed in reference to fluorides: —1. They ..have been sold openly as butter preservatives. 2. Sometimes fluorides are found in phosphatic baking powders. 3. They have been found in certain flour improvers made from rock phosphates. 4. They are present in fertilisers applied to soil for feeding plants. 5. They occur in and are used in insectides, sprayed on fruits and vegetables. “More attention will have to be devoted in New Zealand to the study of fluorine and its influence in life’s functions,” said a Wellington scientist. “I say that emphatically. To commence with, there should be an examination of New Zealand water supplies for fluorine content, more especially in volcanic and post-volcanic areas. Fluorine in bone and teeth is a dread contamination, and is not needed in the human constitution.”

“I think it may be found, quite reasonably, that fluorides in water and foods have been the cause of dental caries and other malformations of children, so explaining the high incidence of dental decay in New Zealand,” said a medical practitioner who has given the subject consideration.