On the Front Line of the Fluoride Wars, Debate Over Drinking Water Treatment Turns Raucous |
by Anna Clark
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On the far east side of Michigan, the future of fluoride in drinking water — long an ordinary practice for preventing tooth decay — has suddenly provoked passionate debate.
Public meetings in St. Clair County, about an hour northeast of Detroit, have filled with people weighing in. One man waved his Fixodent denture cream before the county commissioners, suggesting that his own experience showed what would happen if local communities stopped treatment.
“I am an unfluoridated child,” he declared, “with a set of uppers and lowers.”
Another man, speaking to the county’s Advisory Board of Health, said that personal responsibility should be factored into the conversation. “I think there are some 3 Musketeer bars, Snicker bars that should be accounted for. Some Coca-Colas.”
And a young man used his time in the public comments to address not just fluoridation, but the county medical director who’s trying to get rid of it. He accused him of grandstanding to land a job with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health and human services secretary, by making moves that “lowered the quality of life for underserved people.”
The raucous arguments were spurred by a three-page memo sent in June to the Advisory Health Board by Dr. Remington Nevin, the medical director of St. Clair County’s Health Department. It urges the department to take steps to “prohibit the addition of fluoride” to public water systems because, he wrote in bold print, the additive is “a plausible developmental neurotoxicant” — a claim that runs counter to the assessment of many leading experts and health agencies, which have long celebrated fluoridation as a public health triumph.
Nevin recommended fluoride restrictions that would apply to any system located in the county and serving county residents. Potentially, that could include the Great Lakes Water Authority, which provides water to nearly 40% of the state’s population.
Drinking water fluoridation, which was pioneered in Michigan in 1945, led to a massive drop in tooth decay. Even with the rise of fluoride in toothpaste and other products, it’s credited with a 25% decrease in cavities. But skeptics increasingly hold sway in government, as ProPublica recently reported. Those opponents include Kennedy, the nation’s top health official, who has called fluoride “industrial waste.”
Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency are reviewing their approaches to fluoride in drinking water, and Utah and Florida became the first states to ban fluoridation.
Local communities, though, are on the front lines of the fluoride wars in most states, typically deciding whether or not to continue fluoridating their drinking water by council vote or community referendum. The public conversation in St. Clair County offers a vivid example of how contentious the issue can become. Advocates from well beyond its borders are getting involved, saying that what happens in the county has implications for the entire state.
Home to about 160,000 residents at the base of Michigan’s Thumb, St. Clair County shares a watery border with Canada. Some 67% of its voters chose President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. (Kennedy got under 1% of the vote.) About 110,000........