Failure of water fluoridation

October 23, 2025

Clearly, the incorporation of dental health services into Medicare is long overdue. But Lesley Russell has glossed over the obvious question: “Why isn’t dental health better in Australia, one of the most extensively fluoridated countries in the world?”

The answer is given implicitly in the scientific reviews by the Cochrane Library, the gold standard in impartial systematic reviews of medications and medical procedures. Cochrane’s latest report on fluoridation, published in 2024, reviewed 157 non-randomised studies. (There are no double-blind randomised controlled trials supporting claims of enormous benefits of fluoridation.)

Cochrane found that fluoridation may reduce dental caries by one-quarter of a decayed, missing and filled deciduous tooth on average. But, considering the poor quality of the studies, it stated “we were very uncertain of these findings”.

The poor quality of pro-fluoridation studies has been pointed out for many decades by a few scientists and heterodox dental researchers, but ignored by dental and medical associations and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

This is not surprising because fluoridation has been supported financially by the sugar and processed food industries, which gain from the notion that there’s a magic bullet that prevents tooth decay whatever junk food our children ingest.