Flouride Free Austin has done a lot of work over the last three years educating city council
members and also the general population in Austin.
And what's interesting with our case, you know, there are three kind of what I would
call stages of influence to get fluoride out of your water in your city and in your community.
First is provide the science background to your city council members because the city
council members are the ones making the decision to keep it or take it out.
Provide them with the science, but a lot of city council members don't have the scientific
background to be able to discern, well the CDC or the dentist tell me fluoride is very
healthy and then you're showing me all of these technical papers that say that it's
not healthy and you have the hypothyroidism, cancer, bone cancer issues, um, fluorosis
in children, IQ degradation in children, all this stuff that's come out in the last
ten years and it's new information.
Sometimes council members don't have the scientific background to make in their mind the decision
between those two conflicting sets of data.
So what we've done in Flouride Free Austin, we've kind of taken a step back and said,
you know what, you don't really have to understand that detailed science, let's go to your heart.
You know when you go to the doctor that the physician will never give an adult, a six
foot five man and a three year old child the same dose of a medicine, let's say amoxicillin.
They won't do that.
They will adjust the dose.
Why aren't we adjusting the dose for fluoride?
We don't do that.
It's a one size fits all concentration that comes out of your tap in a glass of water
a six foot tall man and a little three year old child gets the same amount.
Everybody understands that's wrong.
That is the one point that gets people in their heart and they don't have to understand
the science behind that.
They have experiences that they can draw on.
So that is where we've kind of backed up and said okay council members you may not agree
or understand the data, let's talk about the dosage control and the impact on infants and
children and that has made a huge impact for us where we've backed up and said okay we're
not going to get out of the water right away, let's put a warning on our water bill that
says that infants and children, parents need to be aware that you could cause fluorosis,
other issues and that there's no dosage control for these children, small kids and that has
made an impact.
So right now in Austin we have tried that approach and the council has agreed to put
a warning once a year into our water bills and then also post these warnings up at WIC
Centers, Women, Infants and Children Centers and also neighborhood centers.
So we've made progress and it's not where we want to be but we are, we're not giving
up.
Once you educate families on how it impacts their children that they love that's the first
step and then we can go down the next path.
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