Hi Nik,
This
set of pages from the CDC will give you lots of information about the importance of fluoride to teeth. The page says that fluoridation was one of the great public health achievements of the twentieth century.
Like everything else, too much fluoride can cause harm.
This page has information about this idea.
ETA:
This article, which is written in a clear but colorful way, illustrates the way that putative connections between fluoride and lower IQ can be exaggerated way, way, way out of proportion.
This set of pages is about vaccination. Unfortunately, there has been an uninformed backlash against vaccination in the last decade or so. The problem sprung from an unethical researcher named Andrew Wakefield who "studied" children who had been vaccinated with a certain MMR vaccine. He claimed that the vaccine was causing autism. Long story short: he had a financial interest in a DIFFERENT MMR vaccine, and he made up some of his results. This has been
thoroughly documented. Read the Wikipedia entry with his name.
The really sad part about all of this is that what he did has given birth to an industry of fakery that scares people away from vaccinating their children. Diseases that were once nearly eradicated in the west are now reappearing, due in large part of failure to vaccinate. Children have died of diseases like measles and whooping cough as a result. The saddest thing is that some people who haven't been vaccinated yet (young babies, who can die of whooping cough) or can't be (young cancer patients) have picked up these diseases from older children whose parents didn't vaccinate them.
One thing that struck me is that one of your URLs is called "fluoride alert" and the other is "natural news." To me, these names say "We're biased." I realize that some people will claim government conspiracy theories, but the reality is that the CDC refers to papers that were published in peer-reviewed journals written by people who work at universities or in industry. Even government scientists publish in peer-reviewed journals. Even if they did manage to use their power (?) to elbow a bad paper into a journal (such as lies about vaccine safety or fluoride), someone else would catch it and expose it. Or more likely, a lot of people would catch it and expose it.
HTH.
ETA: Some people say that vaccine-preventable diseases aren't dangerous (I believe Jenny McCarthy is famous to preferring measles to a shot). They are wrong. Measles almost killed my sister, who was born a few years before the shot became available. As I noted, whooping cough can kill infants under 6 months old. Polio is renowned for paralysis and death. Etc.!
