Opposition to water fluoridation

[5] A small minority of scientists have challenged the medical consensus, variously claiming that water fluoridation has no or little cariostatic benefits, may cause serious health problems, is not effective enough to justify the costs, and is pharmacologically obsolete.

[15] Organized political opposition has come from libertarians,[16] the John Birch Society,[17] the Ku Klux Klan,[18] Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and the Green Party of the United States.

[20][21] Systematic reviews have cited the lack of high quality research for the benefits and risks of water fluoridation and questions that are still unsettled.

[25] National and international health agencies and dental associations throughout the world have endorsed water fluoridation as safe and effective.

[43][44][45] The scientists or doctors who oppose water fluoridation argue that it has no or little cariostatic benefits, may cause serious health problems, is not effective enough to justify the costs, and is pharmacologically obsolete.

[20][21] Systematic reviews have cited the lack of high-quality research for the benefits and risks of water fluoridation and questions that are still unsettled.

[13] John Doull, chairman of the 2006 National Research Council committee report on fluoride in drinking water, has stated a similar conclusion regarding the source of the controversy: "In the scientific community, people tend to think this is settled.

[55] Trace levels of arsenic and lead may be present in fluoride compounds added to water; however, concentrations are below measurement limits.

The review found that the evidence was of moderate quality: few studies attempted to reduce observer bias, control for confounding factors, report variance measures, or use appropriate analysis.

[51] A 2002 systematic review found strong evidence that water fluoridation is effective at reducing overall tooth decay in communities.

[1] For example, in Finland and Germany, tooth decay rates remained stable or continued to decline after water fluoridation stopped.

[4] Those who emphasize the public good emphasize the medical consensus that appropriate levels of water fluoridation are safe and effective to prevent cavities and see it as a public health intervention, replicating the benefits of naturally fluoridated water, which can free people from the misery and expense of tooth decay and toothache, with the greatest benefit accruing to those least able to help themselves.

[4][13][20] Another journal article suggested applying the precautionary principle to this controversy, which calls for public policy to reflect a conservative approach to minimize risk in the setting where harm is possible (but not necessarily confirmed) and where the science is not settled.

[15] Organized political opposition has come from libertarians,[16] the John Birch Society,[17] the Ku Klux Klan,[18] and from groups like the Green parties in the UK and New Zealand.

Antifluoridationist literature links fluoride exposure to a wide variety of effects, including AIDS, allergy, Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, cancer, and low IQ, along with diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, kidney, pineal gland, and thyroid, though there is no scientific evidence linking fluoridation to these adverse health effects.

[72] A survey in Sheffield, UK, performed in 1999 found that while a 62% majority favored water fluoridation in the city, the 31% who were opposed expressed their preference with greater intensity than supporters.

[85] Dental health professionals and scholarly journals have noted the steep rise in tooth decay, especially in children due to the removal of fluoride in tap water in Israel.

[92] Conspiracy theories involving fluoridation are common, and include claims that fluoridation was motivated by protecting the U.S. atomic bomb program from litigation, that (as famously parodied in the film Dr. Strangelove, where a deranged U.S. Air Force general claimed that it would "sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids") it is part of a Communist or New World Order plot to take over the world, that it was pioneered by a German chemical company to make people submissive to those in power, that behind the scenes it is promoted by the sugary food or phosphate fertilizer or aluminium industries, or that it is a smokescreen to cover failure to provide dental care to the poor.

[70] One such theory is that fluoridation was a public-relations ruse sponsored by fluoride polluters such as the aluminium maker Alcoa and the Manhattan Project, with conspirators that included industrialist Andrew Mellon and the Mellon Institute's researcher Gerald J. Cox, the Kettering Laboratory of the University of Cincinnati, the Federal Security Agency's administrator Oscar R. Ewing, and public-relations strategist Edward Bernays.

During the "Second Red Scare" in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, and to a lesser extent in the 1960s, activists on the far right of American politics routinely asserted that fluoridation was part of a far-reaching plot to impose a socialist or communist regime.

"[11] This controversy had a direct impact on local program during the 1950s and 1960s, where referendums on introducing fluoridation were defeated in over a thousand Florida communities.

It was portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which the character General Jack D. Ripper initiates a nuclear war in the hope of thwarting a communist plot to "sap and impurify" the "precious bodily fluids" of the American people with fluoridated water.

Some anti-fluoridationists claimed that the conspiracy theories were damaging their goals; Frederick Exner, an anti-fluoridation campaigner in the early 1960s, told a conference: "most people are not prepared to believe that fluoridation is a communist plot, and if you say it is, you are successfully ridiculed by the promoters.

In it he claimed he was told by "Charles Elliot Perkins" that: "Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluoride will in time reduce an individual's power to resist domination by slowly poisoning and narcotising a certain area of the brain and will thus make him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him ...

Both the Germans and the Russians added sodium fluoride to the drinking water of prisoners of war to make them stupid and docile."

These statements have been dismissed by reputable Holocaust historians as untrue, but they are regularly repeated to the present day in conspiracy publications and websites.

[101] In Ryan v. Attorney General (1965), the Supreme Court of Ireland held that water fluoridation did not infringe the plaintiff's right to bodily integrity.

[103] The Dutch Court decided that authorities had no legal basis for adding chemicals to drinking water if they did not also improve safety.

In most of these cases, the courts have held in favor of cities, finding no or only a tenuous connection between health problems and widespread water fluoridation.

[106] In September 2024, in Food and Water Watch et al. v. United States Environmental Protection Agency,[107] U.S. Federal Judge Edward Chen ruled that water fluoridation posed an, “unreasonable risk of reduced IQ in children…a risk sufficient to require the EPA to engage with a regulatory response…One thing the EPA cannot do, however, in the face of this Court’s finding, is to ignore that risk.”[108]