The EPA is Attempting to Preserve Water Fluoridation

Trump’s solicitor general for the DOJ, John Sauer, made the decision to appeal a historic decision made in September last year in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that found that current levels of water fluoridation (0.7 mg/L) posed an unreasonable developmental risk to young children based on the preponderance of scientific evidence, most of which had been collected by the National Toxicology Program in a systematic review conducted over several years, and ordered the EPA to take regulatory action to address this risk. The EPA, under admin Lee Zeldin, is challenging this decision which has already provoked several cities across the country to end water fluoridation.

As I mentioned two years ago in The Water is Poisoned, the NTP systematic review, which was used as evidence in the original suit, combed through 55 studies examining the association between levels of fluoride exposure and IQ; 52 found higher levels of fluoride exposure were associated with lower IQ for children. Of the 19 studies rated high quality 18 found higher levels of exposure were associated with lower IQ for children.The NTP working group found, among other things, that drinking water with a WHO recommended 1.5 mg/L fluoride concentration was consistently associated with lower IQ in children and that this exposure had a low to moderate effect, which considering those same children are also exposed to trace amounts of lead is pretty substantial.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of epidemiological studies examining the association between fluoride exposure (prenatal and postnatal) and children's IQ scores (n = 74), published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found a statistically significant inverse association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ scores in both cross-sectional and prospective cohort studies. Individual-level urinary fluoride was associated with a decrease in IQ of 1.63 points (95% CI, –2.33 to –0.93; P < .001) per 1-mg/L increase and this association remained inverse when analyzed by group-level exposure (in water or urine), regardless of subgroup (risk of bias, sex, age, location, exposure timing, or assessment type).

Even the EPA recommended dose of 0.7 mg/L is associated with a higher prevalence of neurodevelopmental problems for young children. As I mentioned in The Water is Poisoned (Part 2), a U.S. based cohort study conducted among pregnant women in LA found that a 1 interquartile range increase in maternal urinary fluoride was associated with a 13.5% increase in scores for emotional reactivity, a 19.6% increase in scores for somatic complaints, an 11.3% increase in DSM-5–oriented Anxiety Problems and an 18.5% increase in DSM-5 Autism spectrum disorder with the magnitudes of the associations being larger across all trimesters than the third trimester alone. A 1 interquartile range increase equivalent to an increase of 0.7 mg/L also doubled the odds of having clinical or borderline clinical range scores on the child behavior checklist. An ecological cohort study conducted in Alberta, Canada found that maternal exposure to fluoride at the 0.7 mg/L level during pregnancy resulted in lower inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility among children 3-5 years of age. Two Mexican birth cohort studies also found that higher maternal urinary fluoride levels predict a 2.84 higher score on the DSM-IV inattention index, a 2.47 higher score on the ADHD index, a 2.12 decrease on the longitudinal General Cognitive Index and a 2.63 point decrease on Performance IQ scores between the ages of 3 to 5 years and 6 to 12 years within an interquartile range of 0.5 mg/L (less than the EPA recommended limit). This suggest that hydrofluoric silicic acid added to tap water can be a neurotoxin not only at the maximum “safe” WHO dosage of 1.5 mg/L but also at the administrative dosages of 0.7 mg/L or less.

While John Sauer is the last person you’d expect to come to the aid of chemical industry interest we cannot say the same for the Trump Admin EPA. Notably, Lee Zeldin started a corporate PR and Crisis management firm, Zeldin Strategies, after losing the New York gubernatorial election and his EPA includes former chemical industry lobbyists like Nancy Beck, who continued to correspond with her former employer, American Chemistry Council (2012-17), after being appointed Deputy Assistant Administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, during the first Trump admin, and implement their regulatory comments verbatim. In the interim between the first and second Trump admin, Beck worked as director of regulatory science for Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP, a DC law firm that helps clients in the chemical industry work around regulations. Lynn Ann Dekleva, who is the current deputy assistant administrator also lobbied on behalf of the clients of the American Chemistry Council particularly manufacturers of formaldehyde before being appointed to the EPA by Biden as the Deputy Assistant Administrator for New Chemicals in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Aaron Szabo, current Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation is a former lobbyist for CGCN Group (2018-23), which has the American Chemistry Council as a high profile client. Alex Dominguez, who also works in the Office of Air and Radiation as the Deputy Assistant Administrator for Mobile Sources, is a former lobbyist for Jim Massie & Partners LLC and the American Petroleum Institute who hired him after his previous stint in the first Trump Admin’s EPA Office of Air and Radiation as an advisor to that Office’s Assistant Admin. Kyle Kunkler, current Deputy Assistant Administrator for Pesticides, is a former lobbyist for the American Soybean Association and Biotech industry until this year. Having this many overt corporate stooges in charge of an agency that is theoretically supposed to protect the American people from being poisoned by the same corporations they spent several years shilling for would reasonably explain why they would ignore the scientific evidence that hydrofluoric salicylic acid in the water supply is detrimental to the neurodevelopment of young children even at the current admissible concentrations.