The dawn of a new era

This paper reviews the scientific events culminating in the fluoridation of communal water supplies. Dental and medical studies completed by 1942 had established the safety and benefits of exposure to drinking water naturally containing fluoride. Researchers and public health workers concluded that it was possible to test the hypothesis that the dental benefits attained where fluoride levels around 1 ppm occurred naturally in drinking water could be safely replicated in low-fluoride areas by raising the level to this optimal concentration. Grand Rapids became the first test site and by the time the demonstration ended in 1959, around 40 million people in about 2,000 communities already were drinking water with fluoride levels that had been adjusted to optimal. The success of fluoridation brought the dawn of the era of caries control and created great opportunities for research and public health.