Brown Stain

by | Dec 11, 2011 | Uncategorized | 1 comment

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In the early 1900’s a young dentist, Frederick Sumner McKay noticed that the residents of a small town in Colorado had a unique brown stained mottling of the teeth, but also seemed to suffer fewer cavities.  He found that the town’s water supplier had high amounts of naturally occurring fluoride.  The area rock formations composed of cryolite; contained fluorine and the rain and snow runoff would leach into the groundwater (Dehkan, 2007). After some 21 years of research, and consulting G.V. Black, another dentist, he concluded fluoride to be the cause.

Oakley, Idaho had a similar problem with considerable mottling of the residents’ teeth. However, their solution was to replace the town water supply. (Meiers, 2010)

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… Colorado Springs helped give birth to the national drive to fluoridate drinking water almost 100 years ago.

It all began with an inquisitive young dentist who set up practice in Colorado Springs and observed an unusual phenomenon particular to those living near Pikes Peak — a gritty discoloration of teeth that came to be known as “Colorado Brown Teeth” or “Colorado Brown Stain.”

Dr. Frederick Sumner McKay’s horse-drawn stage left just before dawn. “It was the first day of January 1901, when in the early morning, the horse-drawn stage left the small hamlet, Evergreen, in the Colorado Rockies,” he would write in his memoirs years later.

“Another train ride from Denver brought me to Colorado Springs, my destination, in the late afternoon,” he wrote. “My broken and crooked pathway had now become a straight line with no deviations, what was to lead to my life’s work.”

That life’s work became evident soon after the then 27-year-old Massachusetts native set up his dentistry practice. As McKay scraped, poked and cleaned the mouths that opened to his tools, the doctor realized that many of his new patients had what he would later describe as “mottled enamel,” a yellow-brown streaking that permanently disfigured the grins of thousands of area residents.

“There for the first time, [McKay] noted that many of his patients had teeth where the enamel appearance ranged from a few white marks to a disfiguring brown color,” dentists Norman Harris and Linda Schierton wrote in a 1989 paper on the history of fluoridation.

The effect would later come to be known as “Colorado Brown Teeth,” in part because of the attention McKay brought to the condition, which is not unique to Colorado. Within the state, however, the effect was particularly evident in Colorado Springs, which drew its water from the watersheds around Pikes Peak.

Many of McKay’s peers in Colorado Springs were resigned to the symptom, describing it as “normal” for the area. But the young Easterner was intrigued because he had never read anything about the phenomenon in his dental texts.

So McKay began to collect data on his patients, writing letters to dentists as far away as Canada and Europe. It turned out that some dentists had experienced the phenomenon in pockets throughout the Rocky Mountains, from Mexico to Canada. Still, no one knew the cause.

When G.V. Black came to deliver a talk in Denver in 1914, McKay enlisted the help of the eminent dentist. (Black was already known as “the father of American dentistry” in dental circles.) Two years later, the pair published “An Investigation of Mottled Teeth,” describing the condition but offering no solutions, in the journal Dental Cosmos.

But it wasn’t until 1931, after McKay enlisted the help of chemists for the American Aluminum Company (Alcoa) at an Alum mine in Bauxite, Arkansas, that they found an interesting similarity shared by water samples from every region that had chronic tooth staining.

They all had high levels of fluoride.

The discovery led McKay to rename the condition “fluorosis,” a condition that still affects many children growing up in Colorado Springs and many other cities around the world where children are exposed to high levels of naturally occurring fluoride.

McKay and others also made another important observation about the patients afflicted with Colorado Brown Stain: they had fewer cavities than most. And so, a second wave of studies began, which ultimately confirmed that small amounts of fluoride can prevent tooth decay and cavities.

By the late ’30s, the U.S. Public Health Service and other dental researchers would claim to have honed down exactly how much fluoride was good, and how much was harmful.

In general, the scientists found that if cities added one part of fluoride per million units of water (or one milligram per liter), then people would experience fewer cavities, without harmful side effects.

If even two parts per million (two milligrams per liter) were added, the general thinking goes, then a significant portion of the population would begin to experience the streaking, browning and yellowing. At 3 parts per million, severe cases of Colorado Brown Stain would be more common.

From the Colorado Springs Independent.

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1 Comment

  1. Todd Fairbanks

    National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion
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    Water System Details
    My Water’s Fluoride Home > Search results > CO 0130030
    Water System Name: Evergreen MD
    Water System ID Number: CO 0130030
    Total population served by water system: 13500
    Primary county and population served: Jefferson
    13500
    Water source: Surface
    Water system type: Community
    Does this water system supply fluoridated water?
    **See Note Below** Yes. This water system adjusts the natural fluoride concentration upward to the optimal level for the prevention of dental caries (cavities).
    Optimal fluoride concentration: 1.00 mg/L
    Fluoride compound used: Sodium Fluorosilicate
    Date fluoridation started: October 1, 1976
    This water system is under the jurisdiction of: State of Colorado
    For further information, contact: CO Dept. of Public Health & Environment (CDPHE)
    Prevention Services Division
    4300 Cherry Creek Drive South
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    Denver, CO 80246-1530
    (303) 692-2470
    cdphe.psdrequests@state.co.us
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    **Information on this page has been compiled from various sources. Verify information with local utility or health department before making any health based decisions.

    This page was last reviewed by CDC on February 6, 2008. The data presented are the most recent provided by the state.

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