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September 27, 2024 - 7:00pm
A federal judge this week ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to further regulate fluoride levels in drinking water to minimise the risk posed to children’s health. It marks a turning point in the fight over public water fluoridation, the potential harms of which have long been dismissed.
Water fluoridation began in the US in the Forties in order to prevent tooth decay, but it was followed soon after by rumours that the project was a communist plot to make Americans less intelligent. The John Birch Society, a fringe Right-wing group that was prominent in the Sixties, pushed this argument and was eventually exiled from the conservative mainstream.
More recently, however, Left-wing environmental activists have led the charge against fluoride, citing health concerns rather than national security. David Brower, former leader of a Left-leaning environmental group, the Sierra Club, co-founded the Fluoride Action Network, which famously opposed the fluoridation programme in Portland. The same group brought the lawsuit which resulted in the new EPA ruling, citing a large collection of studies which found a link between IQ and fluoride. Despite their grounding in science, these critics are often lumped in with conspiracy theorists and portrayed as fringe.
Just this year, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr pledged to “remove neurotoxic fluoride from American drinking water”, and was quickly fact-checked. “Some studies suggest a possible association between greater levels of fluoride exposure during pregnancy or early childhood and reduced IQ in children. But many scientific experts have said the evidence for this association is weak,” FactCheck.org wrote, alongside citations of the CDC and EPA.
For many years, health concerns about fluoride were dismissed. “Science says fluoride in water is good for kids. So why are these towns banning it?” a 2018 MSNBC headline read, while the National Geographic struck a similar tone in an article titled “Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?” “Fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia”, the article read. “Opponents didn’t like the idea of the government adding ‘chemicals’ to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.”
But this week, an Obama-appointed judge, Edward Chen, determined that fluoride, which is added to the drinking water of about 75% of Americans, poses an “unreasonable risk” to consumers. “The scientific literature in the record provides a high level of certainty that a hazard is present; fluoride is associated with reduced IQ,” Chen wrote.
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SubscribeDo we know if fluoride actually reduces cavities in a meaningful way? It’s not like your sloshing water around your mouth when you drink it. When you brush your teeth, you are actually applying it to every tooth in your mouth.
In the UK we’ve got several adjacent regions with identical socioeconomic and demographic profiles but different levels of flouride, naturally or by water treatment. The presence of 0.7mg/l or more of fluoride in the water very strongly correlates with a statistically very significant 25% fewer cavities.
Here’s the thing, the UK treatment target rate is 1.0mg/l and the legal maximum 1.5mg/l. Many mineral waters exceed 0.4mg/l (the “safe” limit cited in this ruling) and natural flouride levels in several areas of the UK are in the range 0.5mg/ to 1.0mg/l. Would this natural water be considered “unsafe”?
Further, flouride in water is just one source. For children, toothpaste may be their single largest source because they swallow it. If it is IQ we are concerned about, then is it safe for toothpaste – something so very obviously swallowed by children learning to brush their teeth – to have such a high concentration of flouride delivered in such an uncontrolled way?
Given the complexities and many trade offs of this topic, the very last people we should allow to guide this debate are judges and lawyers. They are by training and temperament perfectly ill-equipped to deal with ambiguity and represent societal concerns, let alone statistics and science. This cannot be left to “experts” to decide.
Thanks for this
When it comes to health, the normal regulatory standard is “guilty until proven innocent”.
“Factcheckers” betray their bias and their allegiance when they use language like “But many scientific experts have said the evidence for this association is weak”.
“Many experts” means nothing – “Covid” produced “experts” by the sackful, most of them now proven venal grifters, charlatans, and frauds, while the true experts were cancelled and silenced. Science is peer-reviewed publications, not “experts”.
“Weak evidence for an association” means there is evidence for an association. As soon as there is such evidence, the regulatory standard requires that the practice be ceased until there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.