Time to get Opinionated

For my position paper, I have the task of trying to sway my readers into agreeing with my point of view. I was given a list of topics, from which I decided on; All drinking water in NZ should be fluoridated. It seemed like a simple enough task, there has been a heated debate about the pros and cons for years now. Surely I could just pick a side and roll with it, fake it till you make it kind of thing. Man, was I wrong!

There are so many papers and journal articles out there telling us that if we fluoridate our communal water supplies, we will see an increase in dental health. As we are only human, we of course ask what the cost is going to be, or more to the point, which costs less? After reading several articles claiming that the prevention of dental decay (by means of adding fluoride to a communities water supply) is more cost effective than the treatment of dental decay, I found some useful figures based on a scheme in Quebec; for every $1 invested in the scheme, up to $82.83 could be saved in dental costs (Tchouaket, Broussell, Frasi, Dionne, Bertrad & Fortin, 2013). That would be a fairly good incentive for local governments to take action, think of how many extra biscuits could be supplied at meetings with each $83 spared!

Sounds great doesn't it? Everything looks good from a certain angle. If we take a hop, skip and a jump to the other side of the spectrum, there are also a lot of papers and journal articles saying that the dental rewards do not out weigh the hidden dangers. For instance, one article I read, using rats as test subjects, found that the World Health Organisation's recommended dosage can be nephrotoxic (Martin-Pardillos, Sosa, Millan & Sorribas, 2014). Cure one problem but cause another. Using big words that sound scary, like "nephrotoxic", this article encouraged me to swap my crystal clear tap water for a dirty brown ale from a slightly different tap.

With arguments both for and against the fluoridation of water, its been very eye opening for me and only made me delve deeper into the nitty gritty details.

References:

a. Martin-Pardillos, A., Sosa, C,. Millan, A., & Sorribus, V. (2014). Effect of water fluoridation on the development of medical vascular calcification in uremic rats. Elsevier, 318, 40-50.

b. Tchouaket, E., Broussell, A., Frasi, A., Dionne, P.A, Bertrad, E., & Fortin, C. (2013). The economic value of Quebec's water fluoridation program. Zeitschrift fur Gesundhertswissenschaften, 21 (6), 523-533.