The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been ordered to study how fluoride in water could harm children’s intellectual development.
Edward Chen, a U.S. District Judge in San Francisco, California, said Tuesday that while it is not clear whether the amount of fluoride commonly added to water causes lower IQs in children, a growing body of research shows that it may pose an unreasonable risk.
Chen said the EPA needs to take steps to reduce that potential risk, but did not elaborate on what the process would look like.
In August, the National Toxicology Program, part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), released a report saying “with moderate confidence” that there is a link between high levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQs in children. It is the first time a federal agency has made such a finding. It was not designed to assess the health effects of fluoride in drinking water alone.
The trial began in 2017, but Chen suspended proceedings in 2020 to await the results of the National Toxicology Program’s report. He did, however, hear arguments in the case earlier this year.
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You may have heard about fluoride at the dentist or read that it is an ingredient in your toothpaste. That’s because fluoride repairs and prevents damage to your teeth by replacing minerals lost by bacteria in your mouth that produce acid when you eat or drink.
Drinking water also contains low levels of fluoride, which has long been considered one of the greatest public health advances of the last century. Federal officials supported water fluoridation to prevent tooth decay in 1950 and continued to promote it even after fluoride toothpaste came on the market several years later.
The EPA, a defendant in the 2017 lawsuit filed by Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, argued that it was unclear what impact fluoride exposure might have at lower levels. However, the agency is required to ensure that there is a margin between the hazard level and the exposure level.
And “if there is not enough margin, then the chemical poses a risk,” Chen wrote in Tuesday’s decision.
“Simply put, the health risk at exposure levels in U.S. drinking water is high enough to trigger a regulatory response by the EPA” under federal law, he wrote.
EPA spokesman Jeff Landis told The Associated Press that the agency was reviewing Chen’s decision. No further comment was available.
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)’s 2022 water fluoridation statistics, nearly two-thirds of Americans receive fluoridated drinking water.
Federal officials have recommended a fluoridation level of 0.7 milligrams per liter of water starting in 2015. This is down from the upper limit of 1.2 milligrams recommended 50 years ago. At the same time, environmental law has long required that water systems cannot contain more than 4 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water. For comparison, the international safety limit for fluoride in drinking water as set by the World Health Organization (WHO) is 1.5 milligrams.
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.
