Residents will get fluoridated water

By John Loesing Acorn Staff Writer

MICHAEL COONS/The Acorn OPEN WIDE-Agoura Hills dentist Dr. Jonathan Ziv led an effort to get fluoride included in Southern California's drinking water.

The Metropolitan Water District (MWD), the largest water agency in the state, voted Feb. 12 to add fluoride to the drinking water of millions of Californians and two local residents are being given credit for the effort.

Dr. Jonathan Ziv, an Agoura Hills dentist, and Glen Peterson, a board member of both MWD and Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, advocated the passage of a state law in 1995 that required cities to begin adding fluoride to their drinking water. The two continued their push until last week when the MWD vote finally passed.

"I think it’s a good day for the health of all the Southern California region," said Peterson, a member of the MWD board since 1993. Peterson joined the Las Virgenes district in 1987.

Ziv became a member of the California Fluoridation Task Force and worked with Peterson and other dental health advocates to win MWD support.

"We pretty much conceived and planned to current campaign to get Met to fluoridate," Ziv said. "This is a logical outcome of what we’ve been doing for several years and were pleasantly surprised at the outcome."

Port Hueneme is the only city in Ventura County that already fluoridates its water and only recently have cities such as Los Angeles and Santa Monica begun adding fluoride to water in Los Angeles County.

MWD serves 18 million customers from the Mexican border to the Central Coast. The fluoride for local residents will be added to the water at MWD’s Jensen treatment plant in Granada Hills.

Peterson said the fluoride would cost about $1.75 a year for each household in the Las Virgenes district or about $35 over the average person’s lifespan.

"The benefits are enormous," he said. "The top public health officials for all six counties endorsed it, saying it was the best thing they could do for their customers."

Water fluoridation wasn’t always so popular.

"It was very controversial in the ‘50s with the John Birch Society and groups like that said it was a Communist conspiracy to medicate people," Peterson said.

While more than 60 percent of the nation’s population drinks fluoridated water, only about 20 percent of Californians get it.

"I really can’t tell you why we have more of an anti-fluoridation sentiment on the West Coast, but I can tell it was a tiny minority of the population that felt that way," Ziv said.

The addition of MWD’s huge customer base means 70 percent of the state’s residents will soon receive it.

"The benefits have always been there. It was just a matter of getting agencies to do it," Ziv said.

All water in the community contains trace amounts of fluoride, a naturally occurring element. Fluoridation simply increases the quantity.

"The tooth crystal that has fluoride ions in it is harder to dissolve by acid than a tooth crystal that gets formed without fluoride in it," Ziv said. "When there’s a deficiency in the fluoride in the water, as we have in many communities in California, you simply get weak teeth."

Some feel that Americans are being overexposed to fluoride.

Less than 2 percent of Western Europeans drink fluoridated water and the disadvantages, opponents say, far outweigh the advantages.

The Center for Disease control reports 22 percent of all American children now have dental fluorosis as a result of ingesting too much fluoride. Fluorosis is the discoloration and sometimes pitting of the teeth. At the same time, the CDC says fluoridation among school-age children has decreased their cavities.

Ziv disagrees that there are dangers. "There has never been any proven health risk with fluoridation." The MWD fluoridation measure will take about two years to implement, Ziv said.