Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks throughout a marketing campaign rally for Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump at Macomb Group Faculty on Nov. 1 in Warren, Mich. Kennedy has known as for an finish to fluoride within the water provide, a follow that saves billions annually in dental care.
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It’s been thought of one of many best public well being achievements of the twentieth century: by placing a small quantity of fluoride within the water provide, public well being officers have prevented tens of millions of cavities, saved tens of billions of {dollars} in dental prices, and made youngsters more healthy.
However in a submit on X on Saturday, former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated one in every of his first acts as an official in a brand new Trump administration could be to “advise all U.S. water programs to take away fluoride from public water.” He went on to listing a number of false statements in regards to the results of fluoride after which linked to a video on a web site based by distinguished anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Del Bigtree.
Former President Donald Trump appeared receptive to the concept of nixing fluoride from the water provide. “Nicely, I haven’t talked to him about it but, however it sounds OK to me,” Trump stated Sunday in a phone interview with NBC. “, it’s doable.”
Specialists have been swift to sentence the promise to take away fluoride from the water. “Fluoride has been nicely examined. It clearly and definitively decreases cavities, and isn’t related to any clear proof of the persistent ailments talked about in that tweet,” says Dr. Paul Offit, a researcher and doctor at Youngsters’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a science denialist. He makes up his personal scientific truths and ignores the precise truths,” Offit says.
Fluoride has clear advantages
The science is unambiguous — including fluoride to the water provide has been efficient in reducing the variety of cavities in each youngsters and adults. Fluoride works to revive minerals to enamel which can be misplaced when micro organism develop quickly contained in the mouth, significantly after consuming sugary snacks.
Greater than a dozen current research from governments and educational establishments world wide have discovered that fluoride reduces tooth decay in youngsters and adults by round 25%, based on the American Dental Affiliation. It’s significantly helpful for these in lower-income households who could not have entry to fluoride merchandise, similar to toothpastes and mouth rinses. A examine by the Colorado Faculty of Public Well being discovered that including fluoride to the water saved roughly $6.8 billion in dental bills in a single 12 months alone.
In recent times, some research have prompt that top ranges of fluoride may trigger decrease IQ in youngsters. A current authorities overview discovered reasonable proof for the impact, however not on the ranges presently utilized in U.S. ingesting water. The ADA says that the advantages of fluoridation proceed to outweigh any doable dangers.
Stark contrasts
Dr. Amanda Stroud is a dentist who sees the results of fluoride — and its absence — day by day in her job working as dental director at a well being nonprofit in western North Carolina. AppHealth serves youngsters who’ve fluoridated metropolis water and others who’ve nicely water that has no fluoride. The variations are stark, she says.
The kids who’re ingesting water that has fluoride, she says, typically have a superb, strong set of enamel with out cavities. They will take smiling and consuming with out ache as a right, “which is a joyful factor at that age,” Stroud says.
When youngsters are ingesting nicely water, it’s a special story. “They might probably have decay on each tooth,” she says. “After they smile, they may probably have enamel damaged right down to the gum line. Their enamel are showing brown or mottled.”
And that could be a painful situation that makes brushing and maintaining a healthy diet meals like vegetables and fruit tougher. “It is heartbreaking,” she says.
The unique public well being conspiracy idea
Regardless of the clear advantages, conspiracy theories round fluoride have existed for nearly so long as the water has been fluorinated, based on Matthew Dallek, a political historian on the George Washington College.
“In a manner the conspiracy idea about fluoride within the ingesting water is without doubt one of the authentic public well being conspiracy theories,” he says.
Fluoride was first launched in 1945 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which additionally occurs to be the Trump marketing campaign’s final rally website earlier than Election Day.
Placing fluoride in water shortly unfold across the nation as soon as the advantages have been clear in Grand Rapids.
However proper from the beginning, wild theories in regards to the chemical have been circulating. “It served as an virtually excellent conspiracy idea,” he explains. Fluoride was unseen, mandated by the federal government, and current in faucet water, a substance that just about everybody was ingesting.
Dallek says that the theories have been significantly pushed within the Nineteen Sixties by the John Birch Society, a far proper group that alleged communists had infiltrated a lot of the federal government. The group believed that “any step in the direction of authorities interventions was basically a step on the street to a communist nation,” he says. Because of this, they “latched on to fluoride as a part of a communist plot.”
The claims round fluoride have been diffuse, however included the concepts that it could one way or the other be used for thoughts management, or that it was a chemical weapon designed to poison folks. Initially, at the very least, the concepts appeared to seek out some traction with the general public.
“There have been actions that sprouted up everywhere in the nation to cease fluoridation within the ingesting water,” Dallek says.
In 1966, Honolulu’s authorities vetoed a measure to incorporate fluoride within the water. Fluoride nonetheless isn’t utilized in Hawaii and a 2015 report discovered that the state had the best price of tooth decay amongst youngsters within the nation, and it continues to have a number of the worst oral well being of any state.
Mocked in films
However the motion by no means caught on extra broadly. The fluoride conspiracies have been brazenly mocked in films similar to Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” wherein Normal Jack Ripper begins a nuclear conflict partly over a perception that fluoride was a communist plot. By the Nineteen Eighties, the problem largely died away. “Often there have been anti-fluoride campaigns that will pop up across the nation,” Dallek says.
However within the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, fluoride conspiracy theories have resurfaced, typically pushed by people similar to Kennedy who additionally consider that childhood vaccines trigger autism and different ailments. Immediately, anti-vaccine advocates push the harms of fluoride together with these of vaccines and chemtrails, supposed trails of chemical substances left by business airliners to hurt folks and the atmosphere.
Kennedy on Monday posted a video urging his supporters to vote for Trump so he’s elected with a powerful mandate. “Then, nobody will be capable to cease us when he empowers me to wash up corruption within the federal businesses, and particularly our well being businesses,” he stated.
However Offit says that Kennedy’s potential position in main the nation’s public well being might show disastrous, significantly for younger individuals who profit from each fluoride and vaccines. “It’s solely the youngsters who will undergo his ignorance,” Offit says.
