When I was young, in the 1960s, I remember my family opposing the government fluoridation of the South Bend, Indiana water supply, even though our dentist, Dr. Stan Severyn, who we liked and respected, was in favor of fluoridating South Bend water. We thought that when consumed in water, fluoride was a cumulative poison, and we thought the dental benefits of fluoride could be obtained through applying fluoride directly to the teeth (as Dr. Severyn did to my teeth) or through the careful use of fluoridated toothpaste.
My memory is that the South Bend city council overwhelmingly approved adding fluoride to the city waster. My family was in a small minority and our views were widely dismissed. But small minorities are not always wrong. See The New York Times article quoted below. Or see the history of medicine more broadly, for instance when Ignaz Semmelweis was in a small minority suggesting that physicians returning from dissections in the morgue should wash their hands before delivering babies.
When our daughter Jenny was very young, I read that very young children often accidentally swallow toothpaste when they start brushing their own teeth. Then, as now, almost all toothpaste contained fluoride. So when Jenny reached the age of brushing I searched the shelves of several Omaha stores seeking non-fluoridated toothpaste. I finally found a couple of tubes, imported from Sweden I think, in a now defunct store called The Drug Emporium. Jenny used that toothpaste until she was old enough to reliably spit out the toothpaste after brushing.
[In the passages quoted below, “JAMA” stands for The Journal of the American Medical Association which, along with The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, is widely considered to be one of the handful of top medical journals in the world. JAMA Pediatrics is one of several JAMA-associated field journals.]
(p. 19) Water fluoridation is widely seen as one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century, credited with substantially reducing tooth decay. But there has been growing controversy among scientists about whether fluoride may be linked to lower I.Q. scores in children.
A comprehensive federal analysis of scores of previous studies, published this week in JAMA Pediatrics, has added to those concerns. It found a significant inverse relationship between exposure levels and cognitive function in children.
Higher fluoride exposures were linked to lower I.Q. scores, concluded researchers working for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
. . .
The subject is so divisive that JAMA Pediatrics commissioned two editorials with opposing viewpoints to publish alongside the report.
In one, Dr. Steven M. Levy, a public health dentist at the University of Iowa, said that many of the studies included in the analysis were of very low quality.
. . .
In a second editorial published alongside the new study, a public health expert, Dr. Bruce P. Lanphear, noted that as far back as 1944, the editor of The Journal of the American Dental Association expressed concern about adding fluoride, which he termed “a highly toxic substance,” to drinking water. He wrote that “the potentialities for harm far outweigh those for good.”
Some studies have suggested that dental health has improved not because fluoride was added to water, but because of fluoridated toothpastes and better dental hygiene practices.
. . .
Some 74 studies from 10 countries, including China, Mexico, Canada, India and Denmark, were examined. Dr. Lanphear noted that the consistent links between fluoride and I.Q. were found in very different populations.
He urged the U.S. Public Health Service to set up a committee, perhaps one that does not include researchers who have studied the subject in the past and can take a fresh look at the topic, to examine two questions seriously: whether fluoride is neurotoxic, and whether it is as beneficial for oral health as it is believed to be.
“If that doesn’t happen urgently, my concern is there will be growing distrust of public health agencies amid the public, and they will have deserved it,” he said.
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 8, 2025, and has the title “Study Links High Fluoride Exposure to Lower I.Q. in Children.”)
The JAMA Pediatrics academic article mentioned above is: