The Long Battle Over Fluoride Comes to A Head
Around 210 million Americans today have access to artificially fluoridated tap water, and the policy has had a pronounced effect on oral health by reducing tooth decay. It’s widely hailed as a public health success story. In the current lawsuit, plaintiffs are taking a long-standing and, to many experts, provocative stance, arguing that water fluoridation poses a risk to human health, and that the Environmental Protection Agency is obligated to address the issue. The outcome of the case could effectively end water fluoridation in United States. A ruling from Judge Edward M. Chen is expected soon.
In some circles, just entertaining questions about fluoride safety is synonymous with tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorizing. After all, some anti-fluoride activists have, over the years, made wild claims — for example, that fluoride is a form of communist mind control — that don’t have any evidence to back them up.
The lawsuit, though, has put a consequential spotlight on a real scientific debate that has been roiling public health researchers for the past several years.
Today, there is a modest body of evidence suggesting that fluoride, at doses considerably higher than what’s generally in the water, might be bad for human brains, in particular developing fetal brains. A few studies also suggest possible harms from the levels that many municipalities in the U.S. currently add to their drinking water. And most scientists involved agree that the uncertainty warrants more research.
What to make of that uncertainty — and how it should be communicated to the public — has divided researchers. Some experts, especially among dentists, think the evidence is far too weak to be making policy prescriptions. “The best available evidence just doesn’t suggest that this is a real association at the levels to which people are exposed to fluoride in fluoridated water,” said Scott Tomar, a dentist and oral health epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago.
But some current and former federal scientists, as well as academic researchers in toxicology and environmental health, say there’s reason for concern. Some also suggest that something else is going on: Faced with uncomfortable data, they say, water fluoridation proponents have attacked and obstructed fluoride research. And rather than allowing the scientific debate to flourish in the open, dental groups and some public health experts have targeted researchers who study fluoride and brain development, in a pattern that some characterized as suppressing important science.