Dr. Kurt Ferre Leads Community Water Fluoridation Efforts in Oregon
Dr. Kurt Ferre has never been one to let “the way things are done” get in the way of his passions. After three years at the University of Oregon, he knew he wanted to be a dentist, and with three dental schools accepting students without an undergraduate degree in 1972, he said, “What am I waiting for?” and applied to Northwestern University in Chicago.
“One night, I was studying for a physics exam with a fellow classmate and my mom called me and said I got a letter accepting me to dental school,” said Dr. Ferre. “I closed my book and told my classmate I was done for the evening. My life had basically changed overnight.”
Today, he jokes that he’s the only one in his family who doesn’t have an undergraduate degree.
After graduating dental school, he did a general practice residency in St. Luke’s Hospital, followed by three additional years in Chicago working in different modalities, including private practice, public health clinics treating low-income patients, and hospital dentistry.
Soon after, Dr. Ferre and his wife Barb decided to move home to Oregon, where Dr. Ferre joined Kaiser’s dental program, Permanente Dental. Thanks to his experience in Chicago working in hospital dentistry and with children, he became the go-to dentist for any behavioral management problems for children through Permanente Dental.
“I was working with children who had rampant cavities,” said Dr. Ferre. “We would take them to the operating room for outpatient surgery, put them under anesthesia and fix all their cavities at once. I was going to the OR twice a month and still had my adult patients for general dentistry.”
Dr. Ferre says he always had a soft spot for treating children, especially those with the most need, so he started working with Northwest Medical Teams, the predecessor to Medical Teams International, in 2002 at their mobile dental clinic at an elementary school in Newberg. The clinic primarily served Latino, elementary aged students who were attending summer school.
“The second patient I saw that day was a nine-year-old boy with a severe dental abscess on a six-year permanent polar,” said Dr. Ferre. “When I tried to palpate it, he jerked his head away in pain and I asked him how long it had been hurting. He said he couldn’t remember. I had to extract the tooth, and I vividly remember pus pouring out of the infected tooth socket.”
“In my almost 50 years of being a dentist, I’ve never seen that severe of an abscess in a child. I have no doubt that his parents loved him, but they lacked the capacity, education or knowledge of where to take their child for care. That nine-year-old boy changed my life professionally and began my first true lesson of what public health is about.”
Dr. Ferre soon focused that passion for public health on an issue that had bothered him since his first day as a dentist in Oregon: a lack of community water fluoridation.
“I had an epiphany on day one when I started seeing more native-born Oregon mouths,” said Dr. Ferre. “They all had more fillings, more cavities, and more root surface cavities. I saw a much higher rate of rampant cavities in young children than I had seen in Illinois.”
After his experience volunteering with Northwest Medical Teams, Dr. Ferre began advocating for water fluoridation.
“I got connected with likeminded people in Beaverton, including three other dentists, four dental hygienists, angry soccer moms, and others, and we helped pass water fluoridation in Beaverton,” said Dr. Ferre. “Today, there are nearly 100,000 people living in Beaverton who have access to fluoridated water thanks to our work on that campaign.”
Dr. Ferre dipped his toes next into the community water fluoridation conversation in Hood River, where he worked with retired doctor Chuck Haynie. Dr. Haynie’s interest in fluoridation stemmed from his work at the hospital in Hood River and treating youth along the I-84 corridor, where he continually saw children from across the region who needed general anesthesia to treat rampant cavities.
Dr. Ferre and Dr. Haney faced an uphill battle to convince the Hood River community of the benefits of water fluoridation. The effort eventually failed.
“After the Hood River defeat, Chuck and I became fast friends,” said Dr. Ferre. “Over the years, since 2010, we’ve worked together on many water fluoridation efforts.”
While the duo hasn’t had much success with expanding community water fluoridation, they have been successful in fighting back rollback attempts in over 20 communities throughout Oregon and Southwest Washington.
In addition to his work throughout the Pacific Northwest, Dr. Freer has become a national leader in fluoridation advocacy. In 2014 he helped found the American Fluoridation Society, a group that seeks to expand water fluoridation throughout the country and prevent rollback attempts of fluoridation.
With Oregon still ranking 48th out of 50 states for community water fluoridation, Dr. Ferre recognizes that it is an uphill battle to educate the public about the benefits of fluoridation, particularly with the rampant spread of misinformation and scare tactics from the opposition.
“It’s easier to scare the public than to ‘non-scare’ them,” said Dr. Ferre. “I’ve also found that when it comes to support for fluoridation, the passion is an inch deep. With the opposition, it’s an inch wide, but the passion is so strong.”
Even with the ongoing and increasing opposition to community water fluoridation, Dr. Ferre has not backed down, and believes that his efforts are more important today than ever before. With recent fluoridation measures failing in Hillsboro and Lebanon, and increased scare-tactics and misinformation being spread at the national level, Dr. Ferre remains committed to continuing his advocacy work for fluoridation however and wherever he can.
