Buffalo Water will restore fluoride to the city’s water supply by the summer, after getting approval this week from the state Health Department.
City officials made the announcement late Friday, two days after area dental experts sharply criticized the long delay in returning the cavity-fighting mineral to the public drinking water of more than 250,000 city residents.
Dentists are exasperated by the fact that Mayor Byron W. Brown’s administration has missed its own deadline for re-fluoridating the water by the end of 2023.
Area dentists at a Common Council meeting Wednesday ripped into city officials for not moving more swiftly to restore fluoride, which has not been added to the drinking water at optimal concentrations since 2015.
Some dentists described the absence of the mineral as a major health inequity for children living in the city who haven’t been getting the tooth-decay preventing benefits of fluoride that are afforded to suburban children.
City water officials said they were beginning to upgrade an outdated fluoride system in 2016 and stopped when the lead water crisis in Flint, Mich., caused many municipal water suppliers to examine their treatment processes. Buffalo Water wanted to study whether the new fluoride system would cause…
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