Agronomist, your muddled and contradictory arguments are not the product of a rational mind. You open your post with derisory comments about those who support "weak" arguments (i.e., arguments different to your own) with statistics, then proceed to do exactly the same thing yourself.
If you're troubled by weak arguments, then you need to be a bit more self-critical, because your dismissal of rockabillykilla's perfectly valid statistical comparison of adult decay rates across the nation was pathetically weak. Those statistics demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt that water fluoridation is almost totally irrelevant to dental health, with almost identical decay rates across the states, but you dismissed that evidence on the grounds that "not all communities in other Australian states have fluoridated water and some communities in Queensland do, comparing overall Queensland statistics with those for other states is rather meaningless." Are you seriously suggesting that, even with 83 percent of Tasmania's population drinking fluoridated water, the magical decay-preventing powers of fluoride still have no measurable effect on overall decay rates, simply because 17 percent of the population are not drinking fluoridated water? So, when the last Tasmanian finally swallows this poisoned water, fluoride suddenly starts to take effect across the state, and decay plummets by 50 percent? And you talk of "meaningless" arguments!
You also quote, selectively, the 2002 Child Dental Health Survey to support your argument, but failed to mention that the comparisons you referred to were contradicted by the main survey findings which clearly showed no discernible differences between fluoridated and non-fluoridated states / territories. Those findings showed that the ACT, 100 percent fluoridated, had the highest rates of 12-year-old permanent decay experience, and the lowest percentage in the nation with perfect teeth. And you talk of selective use of statistics? Take the beam from your own eye.
If water fluoridation, whether of 50, 80 or 100 percent of the population has no discernible effect in reducing the dental decay rates overall, then it must, by a rational mind, be judged as a total failure. And that's without even looking at the ethical and health issues.

PeterD, you are a perfect example of what I was saying. What is the point of comparing dental caries by states when all states have communities with fluoridated water and those without? Surely you compare across the communities with and without fluoridated water? This is exactly what that study did. And their conclusions on this point were in the executive summary at the front.

Allow me to quote: “however, children from areas where drinking water contained negligible fluoride had poorer dental health than did children from areas with either naturally or artificially fluoridated water” http://www.arcpoh.adelaide.edu.au/publications/report/statistics/html_files/cdhs2002.pdf , page v.

I think if you had bothered to read the rest of my posts instead of offering a knee-jerk response, you might have noticed that I wasn’t using this report as evidence for any huge advantage to fluoride in protecting against dental caries. There are other studies for that and of course most children in Australia have access to fluoridated toothpaste. What the study quite clearly shows is that despite fluoride in toothpaste, there is still a benefit (albeit smaller) in water fluoridation in reducing dental caries.

If you want the clearest evidence for the benefit of water fluoridation on dental caries, you should read the original Kingston/Newburgh studies.

For all of you posters who mentioned research by so & so: could you please add who financed the research?

Btw Agro, If one force-feeds chemicals one should expect also a forced research of everybody just to get the right figures.
This paper suggests right from the start that a certain percentage of fluoride is presumed to be effective and therefore becomes biased.Later in that report it claims that fluoride can even stop caries and reverse its effect, where does that show in the tables? What about the children who did not attend the school program? Were the parents to scared to show off their kids' teeth because they were rotting or didn't they need the dentist's attention? For the pro-fluorites it certainly backs them up. In one of my previous New posts I did mention about my Dutch heritage under the Fluoride regime to follow on with same arriving in Melbourne,hence me leaving my teeth in a glass of now real spring water.
The cause of tooth decay has also not mentioned (which is mostly sugar intake and a host of chemicals from the food industry) so my opinion about this research is too onesided and therefore flawed.

For the record, all of my research was entirely self-financed. My paper, "Water Fluoridation and Crime in America", was discussed on page 2 above, and can be readily accessed at: www.fluorideresearch.org/381/files/38111-22.pdf

Jay Seavey, A.I.A., emeritus

Good point about asking who is funding research being quoted from eftfnc.

In Australia, Adelaide University is credited with most of the research. Their research is funded by the Australian government's NHMRC (National Health & Medical Research Council). The council's members are all the Chief Health Officers the Australian states and territories, whose job it is to push the government policy to fluoridate.

The purpose of the research, being funded by the government, is always to try to justify the government's policy to fluoridate.

Research credited to ARCPOH, NHMRC and Adelaide University is all done at Adelaide University by the same few fluoride-loving dental researchers who are openly biased in favour of fluoridation. Colgate, which has a commercial interest in promoting fluoride sponsors most of the research too, and heavily sponsors Adelaide University dental training.

Australia's research comes from a few researchers paid by a fluoride-pushing but ignorant government (politicians are embarrassingly ignorant of fluoridation issues), and Colgate.

Deb