Fluoride is a known neurotoxin and could be developmentally retarding your children.
How did we allow an entire industry to dispose of their hazardous waste into our drinking water supply?
“historic ruling”
A U.S. District judge in San Francisco, California ruled that there is increasing evidence that the amount of fluoride typically added to water is causing lower IQ (intelligence quotient) levels in kids, and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been ordered to address how fluoride in water could risk children's intellectual development.
This is after environmental nonprofit Food & Water Watch and health advocacy groups such as the Fluoride Action Network, have been in court for nearly a decade after the EPA denied their petition against local water utilities adding in fluorides.
Ashley Malin, a University of Florida researcher who has studied the effect of higher fluoride levels in pregnant women called it “the most historic ruling in the U.S. fluoridation debate that we’ve ever seen.”
You can check out her research on how fluoride exposure prenatally increased odds of their children exhibiting neurobehavioral problems at age 3: my article here and here: https://ufhealth.org/news/2024/study-explores-association-between-fluoride-exposure-in-pregnancy-and-neurobehavioral-issues-in-young-children
Court case began in 2017
The court case started way back in 2017, but Chen paused proceedings in 2020 to WAIT FOR the results of the National Toxicology Program report.
He did, however, hear arguments about the case earlier this year.
Even then, US District Judge Chen was careful to say that his ruling "does not conclude with certainty that fluoridated water is injurious to public health," he said that evidence of its potential risk was now enough to warrant forcing the EPA to take action.
The EPA's response? The EPA had argued that it IS NOT clear what impact fluoride exposure might have at lower levels. However, the agency is required to ensure that there is a margin between the hazard and exposure levels.
Judge Chen wrote in Tuesday's ruling: "if there is an insufficient margin, then the chemical poses a risk."
“Scientific concensus” and industry interests
Mainstream news outlets chose to carry this conservative line that there may be no reason to change decisions on fluoridating the water supply, but there's a reason to continue investigating possible harm, since there are mounting evidence of possible harm.
Did you catch that?
It is high ironic comedy possible here.
Fluoride has been added to community water supplies since the 1940s as a way to reduce dental cavities in children and adults. Nearly three-quarters of the U.S. population receives fluoridated tap water from community water systems.
Let’s start at the very beginning
What is fluoride, and how it became part of conventional medicine? To understand how a neurotoxin could be added to water supplies and incur such a stronghold in ruling agencies, let’s start at the very beginning.
Or at least to the earliest beginning of the thread leading to today’s US EPA.
It wasn’t always so controversial to question the use of fluoride. Dr. Strangelove in the 1964 film Ripper (satire black comedy film by Stanley Kubrick) explains his rationale for inciting nuclear war: “Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water? Do you realize that fluoridation’s the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?”
Citing a movie? I jest.
Let’s dive into some history.
THE FIRST FLUORIDE TRIALS—The different forms of fluoride and what to know
In 1945, Grand Rapids became the first city in the world to fluoridate its drinking water. the citizens of Grand Rapids would be a proud dental vanguard, the first recipients of this miracle chemical drug now accessible to all via the public water system.
On the afternoon of January 25, 1945, municipal workers at the GrandRapids, Michigan, waterworks began feeding powdered sodium fluoride into a system of basins, hoppers, filters, and tanks. Grand Rapids population have a water supply treated with sodium fluoride—a waste product of aluminum production.
During the 15-year trial, researchers monitored the rate of tooth decay among Grand Rapids' almost 30,000 schoolchildren.
Not everyone wanted to wait so long for the results, though. While the Grand Rapids trial was in its infancy, Frisch and his colleagues began to promote fluoridation throughout Wisconsin. In 1947, after two years of fierce campaigning and politicking, they finally convinced city officials to fluoridate Madison’s water supply.
Fluoride sponsors were eager to begin fluoridating other town's water supply. Adding fluoride to water was surely a giant scientific breakthrough that promised to revolutionize dental care.
THE TRIAL DID NOT GO WELL - PROBLEMS
Or did it?
Public Health Service scientists observed a significant decrease intooth decay among children sooner than they’d expected. The results were deemed so successful that the control city 40 miles away,Muskegon, Michigan, accepted fluoridation of its public water.
Doings brought the comparative study, intended to last fifteen years, to an end after only six. But weeks before the start of fluoridation, city officials began receiving complaints about sore gums and peeling tooth enamel, after press accounts wrongly informed readers that the trial would begin nearly January.
To understand the complexities of the trial, and why it was allowed to go on, we’ve to go further back in history.
“black teeth” in Italy and THE COLORADO STAIN
In 1901, in Naples, Italy, a surgeon named John Eager worked for the U.S. Marine Hospital Service conducting medical examinations of prospective U.S. immigrants. Day after day he observed otherwise healthy men and women whose teeth had a mottled, brown stain. Other teeth had black lines running horizontally across them. The locals had named these conditions denti neri and denti scritti: respectively, “black teeth” and “written-upon teeth.”
Meanwhile, in 1901, a young dental school graduate named Frederick McKay had just left the East Coast to open a dental practice in Colorado Springs, Colorado. When he arrived, McKay was astounded to find scores of Colorado Springs natives with grotesque brown stains on their teeth.
The entire teeth were splotched the color of chocolate candy!
The locals blamed strange factors, such as eating too muchpork, consuming inferior milk, and drinking calcium-rich water.As McKay publicized similar stories from around the country, dental experts offered their own theories.
Some speculated about deficiencies of calcium or too much iron; radioactivity and heredity also came under suspicion. McKay, though, homed in on drinking water as the culprit.
On a 1927 visit to Naples, McKay discovered children in one district who no longer showed evidence of denti neri and dentiscritti. Pozzuoli, the Neapolitan suburb now free of the stain, had switched the source of its water supply.
Then in 1909, renowned dental researcher Dr. G.V. Black accepted the invitation and arrived in Colorado.Black previously scoffed that it was impossible such a disorder could go unreported in the dental literature. But he was intrigued by astudy that almost 90 percent of the city's locally born children had signs of the brown stains.
When Black arrived in the city, he too was shocked by the prevalence of Colorado Brown Stain in the mouths of native-born residents. For six years, the two worked together and found that nearly 90% of children native to Colorado Springs suffered from the stain.He wrote:"I spent considerable time walking on the streets, noticing the children in their play, attracting their attention and talking with them about their games, etc., for the purpose of studying the general effect of the deformity. I found it prominent in every group of children. One does not have to search for it, for it is continually forcing itself on the attention of the stranger by its persistent prominence.
This is much more than a deformity of childhood. If it were only that, it would be of less consequence, but it is a deformity for life."Black would investigate fluorosis for six years, until his death in 1915.
Oakley, Colorado Springs—mottled teeth after a new Pipeline water
In 1923, McKay trekked across the Rocky Mountains to Oakley, Idaho to meet with parents who had noticed peculiar brown stains on their children's teeth. The parents told McKay that the stains began appearing shortly after Oakley constructed a communal water pipeline to a warm spring five miles away.
McKay analyzed the water, but found nothing suspicious in it. Still,he advised town leaders to abandon the pipeline altogether and use another nearby spring as a water source.
It worked—the younger children of Oakley were sprouting healthy secondary teeth without any mottling.
His suspicions about the pipeline water seemed right. McKay now had his confirmation, but he still had no idea what could be wrong with the water in Oakley, Colorado Springs.
Aluminium town Bauxite, Arkansas—“Whoever heard of fluorides in water?”
McKay and Dr. Grover Kempf of the United States Public Health Service(PHS) traveled to Bauxite, Arkansas-a company town owned by the Aluminum Company of America-to investigate reports of the familiar brown stains. Just five miles away in another town, the children showed no signs at all.
McKay’s investigative research landed on the desk of ALCOA's chief chemist, H. V. Churchill, at company headquarters in Pennsylvania.Churchill had spent the past few years refuting claims that aluminum cookware was poisonous and he didn’t want fresh fodder for Alcoa's detractors.Thus, he decided to conduct his own test of the water in Bauxite-but this time using photospectrographic analysis, a more sophisticatedtechnology than that used by McKay.
Churchill asked an assistant to assay the Bauxite water sample. After several days, the results: the town's water had high levels of fluoride. Churchill was incredulous. "Whoever heard of fluorides in water," he bellowed at his assistant. "You have contaminated the sample. Rush another specimen."
Churchill finally sat down at his typewriter in January, 1931, and composed a five-page letter to McKay. In the letter, he advised McKay to collect water samples from other towns "where the peculiar dental trouble has been experienced... We trust that we have awakened your interest in this subject and that we may cooperate in an attempt to discover what part 'fluorine' may play in the matter."
The truth after a 30-year quest
McKay collected the samples. In mere months, he had the answer after a 30-year quest: high levels of fluoride in the water indeed caused the discoloration of tooth enamel.
The water contained fluoride concentrations of 13.2 parts per million(ppm)—around 26 times the average. Other afflicted communities also showed elevated fluoride levels. With further study the correlation became causation: after 30 years researchers had transformed “Colorado stain” into dental fluorosis.
It was thanks to McKay’s tireless work that research on fluoride and its effects on tooth enamel finally began in earnest.They decided to use fluoride—safe and effective.
“mottled tooth enamel is unusually resistant to decay”
You’d think that policymakers and researchers would heed the warning tale of McKay’s discoveries.
Not quite.
Dr. H. Trendley Dean, head of the Dental Hygiene Unit at the National Institute of Health (NIH) argued that mottled tooth enamel is unusually resistant to decay. Wouldn’t a low level of fluoride to drinking water at physically and cosmetically safe levels would help fight tooth decay? It could be safe and effective.
Thus he began the Grand Rapids Trials…
The entire saga IS one with players of political intrigue, subterfuge, and governmental overreach and flexing… You can read some of it here. The facts offered towards its approval, however, are:
At the trial’s conclusion in 1959 examiners saw a 55.5% reduction in caries per child. The Public Health Service and the American Dental Association endorsed fluoridation in 1950, under pressure from the Wisconsin Fluorine Study Committee.
Fluoride is used commonly used—or is it?
The result is that practically every toothpaste on the market contains fluoride as its active ingredient. But only 11 nations in the world have a 100% fluoridated water supply. Europe does not fluoridate its water.
Water fluoridation projects currently cover 200 million Americans, or about three-fourths of people in the United States. One-third of Canadians have fluoride added to their drinking water.
Other countries, towns, and communities have not embraced this policy.
Not least, because the evidence was already piling up. In a report from around the Grand Rapids trial: Robotry and Water: A Critique of Fluoridation (1959). This is until today the Fluoride Action Network and Citizens for Safe Drinking Water have chronicled the studies on the chemical linked to several varieties of cancer, diminished intelligence, birth defects and declining birth rates, and heart disease—among other maladies.
growing awareness on fluoride toxicity—What many studies show about how fluoride in water affects babies in utero
Now we’ve gained some understanding as to how the belief in fluoride was held for almost 80 years now, health authorities have declared that community water fluoridation—a practice that reaches over 400 million worldwide—is safe.
This belief is upheld through policy and regulation.
It is not through lack of research, which adds to the mounting evidence, adding to what was already known BEFORE AND DURING THE GRAND RAPIDS TRIALS!
In 2006, a report by the National Research Council (NRC)6 acknowledged that fluoride exposure may be associated with adverse cognitive and endocrine outcomes. One NRC panel member, Dr. Isaacson, said the report “should be a wake-up call”. Yet, nearly 10 years later, not a single study had directly examined fetal exposure to fluoride in humans.
It is an open knowledge that it is taboo to question, and thus research, fluoride. Dr. Phyllis Mullenix,7 former Head of the Toxicology Department at the Forsyth Dental Centre in Boston, was heavily criticized for publishing her study showing that sodium fluoride was neurotoxic to developing rats.
Lower IQs in offspring exposed pre-natally to fluoride
At the start of this piece, we asked the incredible question: IF fluoride is a known neurotoxin, and we know it could be developmentally retarding your children.
How did we allow an entire industry to dispose of their hazardous waste into our drinking water supply?
Do you wonder how truth bombing research like that doesn’t reach your coffee and news desk?
Read this piece:
In August 2018, we presented our findings at an international meeting held in Ottawa. We were nervous how the results would be received by the audience, which included members from Health Canada and other public health agencies. Afterwards, someone approached me and said, “Congratulations – you have just sabotaged your career before it even started”. Rivka Green on sharing the results of the study showing lower IQs linked to higher prenatal fluoride exposure
Green’s study was initially rejected because “of low research relevance”. Why spend time and resources questioning “science” and “policy”, right?
Eventually, they hired an independent data analyst to rerun all of the analyses for the third time. “In April 2019, JAMA Pediatrics accepted our paper. We responded to several additional rounds of review by the JAMA editors until we eventually reached a compromise that reflected the strength of the evidence, as well as their implications for public health.”
It took another year after that conference in Ottawa, before the article was published on August 19, 2019. In only 2 months, it was viewed over 100,000 times and ranked among the top 0.0005% of research output scored by Altmetric.
Meanwhile, mainstream news missed the whole point again. Canada’s national newspaper rang with the headline, “Fluoride won’t make you dumber, but the ‘debate’ about its safety might”.
The “debate” became less about scholarly debate on the neurotoxicity of fluoride; it was an attack on IQ scores, statistical methodology, and observational studies.
I’ll go more into this in another article.
So you see, truth-bombing research doesn’t reach your usual newsfeed scroll as you enjoy your coffee break.
On prenatal exposure to fluoride, especially to boys
Four well-conducted studies over JUST the last 3 years consistently linked fluoride exposure in pregnancy with adverse neurodevelopmental effects in offspring.
As a mother who also sees other mothers struggling with their children, it’s important that ANY possible danger, harm, and toxin in our environment be alerted to ALL of us. This isn’t to add more stress to a parent’s plate, but to raise our collective awareness of how we are raising our children, our future generation.
If we don’t know, we cannot do better.
To the scientists and advocates working tireless to question medicating water supplies:
Do not avoid difficult areas of investigation. Take risks. If scientists exclusively choose the safe routes, avoid controversial research problems and play only minor variations of someone else’s themes, they voluntarily turn themselves into technicians. Our craft will indeed be in peril. — Herbert Needleman, MD