Utah’s Fluoride Ban Praised By Kennedy

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants local governments to stop adding fluoride to the water supply.

Fluoride has been added into public water supplies for decades as a way to help prevent tooth decay.

Kennedy said Monday during a visit to the Beehive State that it makes no sense and praised Utah for being the first state to ban it outright.

Kennedy said he'll be reconvening a task force to review the health effects of fluoride.

The task force last reviewed fluoride in 2013 and recommended using it as a low-cost and safe method to improve public health.

Kennedy warns it could have several health risks, including hyperthyroidism and osteoarthritis.

In Southern Utah, fluoride is not added to to the drinking water supply, however in a paper published by one of the premier health institutions in the United States, Johns Hopkins University, fluoride is touted as being able to "passively protect the oral health of Americans for decades by reducing cavities, tooth decay, and dental health disparities. So much so, that the CDC has declared community water fluoridation one of the 20th century's greatest public health achievements."

However, recently public concerns have surfaced over the safety of flouridating water in public drinking supplies.

Kennedy has long said he is against the practice, although to date no adverse effects have been documented because of the practice, especially if the fluoride is in extremely low doses.

"At very high levels of fluoride intake, you can get some erosion of tooth enamel, which predisposes them to staining from things like drinking coffee. That is what these researchers were seeing. But they noticed at slightly lower levels of fluoride, you saw primarily cavity prevention," Johns Hopkins report.

"The biggest side effect that people were concerned about in the past was dental fluorosis, which is dose dependent.

"At low doses, it may just cause little white specks on the teeth, but those teeth are also more resistant to dental decay.

"As you get to higher doses, then you can start to have more adverse effects. And in some parts of the world where there are very high levels of fluoride in the environment, you actually have a chronic condition that develops called skeletal fluorosis, which is essentially very brittle bones. We don't see that sort of fluorosis in the U.S."

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