Good afternoon, Mayor Leffingwell and Councilmembers.  This month—which marks a year since I first spoke here —brings some news.  The Fluoride Follies blog has transformed into a full-fledged website at www.fluoridefreeaustin.com.  The blog is still there, along with some powerful new features like news and, links, and a direct email address to reach us.  We’ll be posting downloadable educational materials too—a couple of flyers are up already—as well as some information about the City Council.  The website, being brand new, is fairly basic at the moment, but we expect to build it into something really fine.  This is through the efforts of a very talented young man, our webmaster Doug.  So kudos to him. 

A local dentist gave me a copy of this extremely hard-to-obtain 56-page booklet called Building Better Oral Health:  A Dental Home for All Texans.  It’s a report commissioned by the Texas Dental Association—the first of its kind—and dated Winter ‘08, so it’s recent.  What immediately struck me was that the choice of typefonts and colors makes it very difficult to read—and whoever designed it must have known that.  Perhaps they didn’t want it widely read? 

That’s quite possible.  Because within these pages can be found abundant evidence of the utter ineffectiveness of community water fluoridation for its most oft-stated purpose: namely, improving the dental health of underserved populations, especially children.  The failure is expressed, not directly, but indirectly, between the lines, in tacit admissions and flagrant contradictions.  While, like all official publications of the American dental health industry, it promotes fluoride, it does so with less than the usual zeal, as if the authors were, just once, allowed to stray from their primary propaganda mission.  The results show.

I finst encountered the report online, where it’s a bit more legible, provided you have a large screen monitor.  Just Google “A Dental Home”, hit the Lucky Button, and you’ll be right there.  http://www.buildingbetteroralhealth.org/media/TDA_full_report.pdf   I’ll have more to say about this document in the future.  Thank you.  .