Surgeon General Advises Communities to End Fluoridation
Florida’s State Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, MD, PhD, held a press conference on Friday, November 22nd to announce that his office is advising all communities within the state to stop adding fluoridation chemicals to the public drinking water due to the neurotoxic risk the practice poses to the developing brain. Dr. Ladapo has both a medical degree and a PhD in health policy from Harvard and is a professor of medicine at the University of Florida, where his focus is on reducing health risks for low-income and disadvantaged populations.
He was joined at the press conference by Florida dentist Claire Stagg, DDS, MS, and Ashley Malin, PhD, an assistant professor in the department of epidemiology at the University of Florida’s College of Public Health. Dr. Malin was the lead author of a study published in May in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that found that children of mothers living in fluoridated Los Angeles, California had double the odds of several neurobehavioral problems compared to mothers with lower fluoride exposures. Funding for the study was provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and it was the 10th consecutive NIH-funded study in humans finding adverse effects of fluoride on children’s developing brains.
Dr. Ladapo credited the Fluoride Action Network’s (FAN) recent victory in federal court and the judge’s ruling that water fluoridation “poses an unreasonable risk to human health” for bringing the issue to his attention. This led Dr. Ladapo to investigate the science further, including the National Toxicology Program’s systematic review published in August, which found that there is consistent, substantial, and high-quality evidence from diverse birth cohort groups in 5 different countries confirming that fluoride is comparable to lead in its ability to lower IQ and impair brain development in children.
During the press conference, Dr. Ladapo explained that for much of his career he “supported this practice,” but after reviewing the science, he “was appalled” by the amount of evidence showing “that fluoride is neurotoxic” and the evidence of side-effects having “been in the [scientific] literature for many years.”
Dr. Ladapo provided the following advisory:
“[Fluoridation] is public health malpractice, and so we are issuing guidance to every community, every municipality, every county in Florida to stop adding fluoride to their community water systems. And I will tell you that the data that we have, the studies that we have, primarily are focused on pregnant women and children, those are clearly the most sensitive and vulnerable populations for fluoridation in terms of these adverse neuropsychiatric effects. But I personally, in my family, we’ve pulled back in terms of sources of fluoride because we’re concerned about the effects in adults also.”
He went on to directly counter misinformation being spread by the American Dental Association (ADA) and other pro-fluoridation special interest groups:
“So, the typical criticism has been that these studies were in countries like China or India where, say the naturally occurring amounts of fluoride are much higher than what we have here in the United States. Well, it turns out that in fact that wasn’t true. In the last five or six years there have been several studies that have been published, Dr. Malin has actually published some of these studies, in communities in Canada, also in the United States, where levels of fluoride are actually quite similar to the levels that we have here in this state and in this country. And these studies have actually found the same findings – that moms and children exposed to higher levels of fluoride have experienced adverse neurologic and neuropsychiatric effects.”
His office has provided formal guidance for citizens, decision makers, and water treatment employees to better understand his office’s recommendation and will provide a tool on their website so Florida residents can look up their address to determine whether fluoridation chemicals are added to their water.
Dr. Ladapo’s announcement was followed by a statement from Dr. Malin, who said:
“Now I first want to say that although this issue has become politicized recently, I really don’t view this as a political issue. I view this as a human rights issue and a public health issue and one that is separate from other public health issues that are currently being highlighted in the media and political sphere. As Dr. Ladapo mentioned, in the last seven years there have been numerous high-quality, rigorously conducted, prospective pregnancy and birth cohort studies in North America showing that chronic, relatively low prenatal fluoride exposure levels are associated with poor neurodevelopmental outcomes, including reduced IQ, more symptoms of ADHD, and declines in executive function. While these studies have been conducted among populations based in Canada and Mexico, the fluoride concentrations that these pregnant women were exposed to are similar to those encountered among pregnant women in fluoridated US communities.
In September a federal judge in San Francisco made a ruling in the fluoride trial against the EPA that stated that fluoride and drinking water at the current recommended level of .7 milligrams per liter poses an unreasonable risk of hazard to child IQ because there is not enough of a margin of safety between the hazard level and the exposure level that is added to community drinking water. The ruling stated that the EPA’s default is for there to be a factor of 10 between the hazard level and exposure level due to variability in human sensitivities. Based on the NTP’s report, the hazard to child IQ exists at 1.5 milligrams per liter. Therefore, according to the EPA standard, the exposure level for fluoride in community drinking water would need to be set at 0.15 milligrams per liter or lower to create enough of a margin of safety to protect child IQ.”
Dr. Malin’s statement was followed by a brief statement from Dr. Stagg and a Q&A session.
The Fluoride Action Network applauds the actions of Dr. Ladapo, Dr. Malin, and Dr. Stagg, and we echo Dr. Ladapo’s sentiments when he said, “I can’t imagine why anyone who was a leader in a community would not want to reduce the amount of fluoride while promoting dental health through other methods. I just can’t understand why someone would not reach that conclusion.”
FAN is currently working with state-level decision makers around the country to keep this momentum moving forward towards drinking water policy that protects all residents, including the fetus and infants. Please share this advisory with your local and state officials.
Category: children, Education, family, Health & Fitness, Life Style, Local News, National News
