Story at-a-glance:
- Government-funded studies confirm skyrocketing fluorosis rates, fetal and infant neurotoxicity, and numerous other side effects from fluoridation.
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has helped create and promote a new fluoridation system they hope will expose nearly 20 million more Americans to harmful levels of fluoride.
- The governments in the United Kingdom and New Zealand have passed bills that will effectively mandate fluoridation throughout their nations.
(The Defender) The published science over the past decade has taught us a lot about water fluoridation, about both the very real and significant side effects inflicted on the public, but also about the credibility of those who continue to vouch for its safety.
At this point, the question we must ask isn’t whether the overwhelming risks outweigh the theoretical scant benefits, or whether more research is needed to draw strong conclusions.
No, the only appropriate question now is: How much more harm will the promoters and regulators of fluoridation allow the practice to inflict on the public?
Without the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), our coalition partners, and people like you taking a stand, their answer will be a resounding, “a lot more harm!”
With their credibility and influence at stake after defending fluoridation for more than 75 years, they’ve sadly shown that they’ll not only be the last to act but that they plan to double down until we stop them.
As we speak, tens of millions of residents currently living on community water systems with no added fluoride throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are facing the imminent threat of having their water dosed with hazardous fluoridation chemicals.
The CDC has announced a new strategy and helped develop a new technology to fluoridate an additional 19+ million Americans, which will also eventually expand to Canadians, Australians and likely others.
Meanwhile, the governments in the U.K. and New Zealand have exploited the recent pandemic to pass sweeping health care reform bills that effectively include nationwide fluoridation mandates due to decades of strong pushback from residents and elected officials at the local level, keeping fluoridation at bay.
Fluoride has already damaged the teeth of millions
The CDC’s own data taken from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys has repeatedly found that our children in the United States are significantly overexposed to fluoride, evidenced by skyrocketing rates of dental fluorosis.
Fluorosis is a biomarker of toxicity from ingested fluoride, and is a permanent tooth defect, causing unsightly discoloration and mottling of the teeth, weakening the enamel and resulting in increased dental decay.
Ingesting fluoridated water — particularly in reconstituted infant formula — and processed foods made with fluoridated water are recognized as the primary sources of exposure, though swallowing toothpaste and fluoride prescriptions also contribute.
A 2015 review of the practice of fluoridation by the Cochrane Collaboration, the gold standard for evidence-based reviews of health interventions, found that “there is a significant association between dental fluorosis (of aesthetic concern or all levels of dental fluorosis) and [water] fluoride level.”
The CDC reported that 41% of adolescents (12 to 15) had dental fluorosis in 2004. At the time this was an increase of over 400% from the rates found 60 years prior. Then the 2012 survey found that the rate jumped significantly to 65+% of adolescents with dental fluorosis.
Now, according to a recent study (Yang, June 2021) published in the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety using the data from the NHANES 2015-16 survey, the “prevalence of dental fluorosis was 70% in the U.S. children.”
This means that the teeth of millions of children, teens and adults have already been damaged by overexposure to fluoride during development, and the CDC, along with the other promoters of fluoridation are fully aware.
However, the teeth are not the only tissues in the body that are harmed by or accumulate fluoride. There is no apparent reason, therefore, why fluoride’s effects on the body would be limited to the teeth.
As noted by the renowned dentist and researcher Dr. Hardy Limeback:
“… it is illogical to assume that tooth enamel is the only tissue affected by low daily doses of fluoride ingestion.”
NHANES data have been used in recent published and peer-reviewed studies to link fluoridated water with a number of additional side effects, including earlier onset of menstruation for black teens, sleep disorders in adolescents, increased uric acid levels in the blood, and kidney and liver impairment in adolescents.
Additional studies on fluoridation have also recently found higher rates of hip fractures, disruption of the endocrine system and increased rates of hypothyroidism.
Fluoride is the new lead
There is now a large body of government-funded research indicating that fluoride is neurotoxic, and is associated with lowered IQ in children and a significant increase in ADHD diagnosis and related behaviors in children at doses experienced in fluoridated communities. Experts in toxicology have likened the size of the effect to that of lead.
To date, 69 human studies, most from endemic fluorosis areas in China, have associated lowered IQ with fluoride exposure.
The highest quality fluoride brain studies have been published since 2017 when the first of five NIEHS-NIH (National Institutes of Health) funded prospective-cohort studies were published (Bashash et al., 2017) finding an association between fetal exposure to fluoride and lowered IQ in Mexico.
A year later, another NIH-funded study found an increase in ADHD symptoms associated with in utero exposure to fluoride (Bashash et al., 2018).
Over the next two years, two more of these government-funded studies found similar results, linking fetal exposure to fluoridated water in Canada to lowered IQ (Green et al., 2019) and finding that bottle-fed infants in fluoridated communities in Canada had a significantly lowered IQ compared to bottle-fed infants in non-fluoridated communities (Till et al., 2020).
And just last year, the fifth NIH-funded study (Cantoral et al, 2021), found that for every 0.5 mg increase in dietary fluoride intake during pregnancy was associated with a 3.10 to 3.46-point lower cognitive score in boys.
The authors stated:
