What's happening with Fluoridation in NZ?
Daniel Ryan - 8th August 2022
New Zealand introduced community water fluoridation (CWF) in the 1950s, expanded its coverage rapidly in the 60s, and has been relatively stable until recently.
In the past, local authorities have faced significant battles over fluoride in their water supplies. On the one side, there was the scientific community, with various respected organisations showing how safe and effective CWF is. On the other side, you had loud anti-fluoride activists scaremongering - blaming all sorts of problems on fluoride, targeting councils & individual councillors. Councillors would even get death threats over these discussions. So it’s understandable that they didn’t want to touch the subject.
“We’re all beating ourselves up over this, stressing about it and having hours and hours or days of submissions. Then it gets challenged, and it goes to court. The problem is it’s costing ratepayers literally hundreds of thousands of dollars - and this is going on all over New Zealand.” - Ross Church, Kapiti Mayor.
In 2016, Akash Kota, Aiden McGillicuddy, Mark Honeychurch and I, all members of Making Sense of Fluoride (MSoF), met up with Peter Dunne, the Associate Minister of Health at the time. We wanted to convince him that something needed to change, and we wrote up a quality summary of the situation of fluoridation in New Zealand, as well as an overview of the science. Dunne was already very aware of the anti-fluoride movement and its tactics - even citing the anti-fluoride group in Timaru, who loved to attack him via editorials in the newspaper. The good thing was that we didn’t need to convince him. Work was already being carried out and headed by Dr Jonathan Coleman, who was looking at the options available for removing CWF decision-making from councils.
So MSoF waited for that change. A new bill was introduced at the end of 2016, and had its first reading; the decision-making was moved from local councils to District Health Boards (DHBs). And then nothing more happened to the bill when Labour, the Greens, and NZ First went into power. Only when Labour governed alone, after 2021, did we see more action in the bill. Dr Ayesha Verrall amended that it should be the Director-General of Health instead of DBHs that would be responsible for decision-making. The bill finally passed five years after it was introduced.
Then, at the end of last month, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield sent requests to 14 councils around the country to fluoridate their water. This was one of Dr Bloomfield’s final actions before leaving his position. This was the first sizable bump since the 1960s, and increased the availability of fluoridation to New Zealanders from 51% to about 60%. The time limit to implement this fluoridation is between six months and three years, depending on each area’s current water supply circumstances - so we should finally see some action soon! Dr Bloomfield has said the aim is to get our country to 80%.
This is terrific news, especially after the significant blunder that Wellington had kept hidden from the public until recently. Wellington Water had stopped fluoridating some areas for more than a year. Marua treatment plant stopped its CWF in May 2021, and in November at the Gear Island plant - these plants supply water to Wellington, Upper Hutt, Porirua, Stokes Valley, and Manor Park. Wellington’s water hasn’t been fluoridated properly since 2016, and the regulators raised no concerns. New Zealand Dental Association spokesman Dr Rob Beaglehole said, “it was a dental disaster.”
Still, anti-fluoridationists have been seen targeting councillors, even now that the decision is not within the council’s power. More than 50 people heckled Waipā District councillors at a recent meeting about starting CWF. Ex Fluoride Free New Zealand spokesman, and Te Awamutu Community Board member, Kane Titchener called the councillors criminals, and after all these years he continues to spread the misinformation that CWF lowers IQ. He conveniently ignores three high-quality studies that show no association, from New Zealand (2015), Spain (2021) and Sweden (2021), with recent independent reviews saying there is “insufficient evidence” that CWF affects neurological development or “that fluoride should be categorized as a human developmental neurotoxicant”.
So why do we go through all this hassle to adjust fluoride levels in our water?
Tooth decay is a common disorder, second only to the common cold. It remains a significant health problem in New Zealand, especially among low socioeconomic groups.
While not a silver bullet, fluoride is vital in reducing caries. Water fluoridation at levels used in New Zealand reduces the prevalence and severity of tooth decay cost-effectively, without causing adverse health effects. It benefits everyone with natural teeth - with the most significant benefit to the most vulnerable in our communities; children, the elderly, the disabled, Māori and the poor.
Our world-renowned Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, following a thousand children from birth since 1973, has found that children who grow up in fluoridated areas have better overall development because of a reduction in the burden of tooth decay.
A Royal Society Review suggested that removing fluoridation would have both direct and indirect costs to society: “Tooth decay is responsible for significant health loss (lost years of healthy life) in New Zealand. The ‘burden’ of the disease – its ‘cost’ in terms of lost years of healthy life – is equivalent to 3/4 that of prostate cancer, and 2/5 that of breast cancer in New Zealand. Tooth decay thus has substantial direct and indirect costs to society.”
The science is unequivocal; fluoridation is effective, with no credible evidence of harm. It’s time for everyone who can in this country to benefit from fluoridation - let’s spread fluoridation to those communities that have sadly missed out for so long.
