Utah to Become First State to Ban Fluoride in Public Water
Most public-health experts say the mineral additive is crucial protector against tooth decay
"...The Republican governor said that half the state already doesn’t have fluoride added to the water and that dentists he had spoken to said there haven’t been dramatic differences between the different counties.
“It’s got to be a really high bar for me if we’re going to require people to be medicated by their government,” said Cox on ABC4 Utah.
“It’s not a bill I felt strongly about; it’s not a bill I care that much about, but it’s a bill I will sign,” he said.
The Utah law is set to take effect in early May. It will be the first state with such a ban. ..."
"...Typically, local municipalities decide whether to add fluoride to their water, though some states require water systems of a certain size to fluoridate. Lawmakers in states including Kentucky and South Dakota have filed bills to challenge those mandates.
Lawmakers in states including North Dakota, Tennessee and Montana have also attempted to follow in Utah’s footsteps and pass bills banning the practice statewide.
...As of 2022, about 72% of the U.S. population on community-water systems were receiving fluoridated water,
according to CDC data. However, many European countries, such as France and Germany, don’t add fluoride to their water.
Some cities that chose to defluoridate later added fluoride back to the water supply. The Canadian cities of Calgary and Windsor both chose to refluoridate after studies found an uptick in tooth decay.
Critics of the practice notched a victory last year when a federal judge in California ruled that the CDC-recommended fluoride level—0.7 milligrams per liter—posed an unreasonable risk of harm.
The judge said the fluoride level didn’t comply with federal standards requiring an exposure level below one-tenth of the level at which a substance is hazardous. He ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to take regulatory action in response, but didn’t specify what it should be.
...The criticism of fluoride as an additive gained greater prominence with the ascendance of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
He called the mineral “an industrial waste” in a social-media post late last year.
“I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said fluoride lowered IQ,” Kennedy
said at his confirmation hearing. “JAMA published a meta-review of 87 studies saying that there’s a direct inverse correlation between IQ loss.”
Kennedy appeared to be referring to
a review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics. The review, which analyzed 74 studies, found that exposure to high levels of fluoride was associated with lower IQ scores in children.
The levels studied, however, were more than twice as high as what is recommended by the CDC—and the authors noted that many of the studies had a high risk of bias. ..."
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