‘The risk to health at exposure levels in United States drinking water is sufficiently high to trigger regulatory response by the EPA,’ Judge Edward Chen said.
A federal judge in California on Sept. 25 ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to strengthen its rules around fluoride in drinking water, writing that the compound could pose a risk to children’s intellectual development.
In an 80-page
ruling, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco noted that while it is not certain that the amount of fluoride that is typically added to drinking water can lower the IQ in children, he concluded that new research suggests that it might pose such a risk.
In August, the federal National Toxicology Program found that there is a link between higher amounts of fluoride exposure and a lower IQ in children, potentially upending the longstanding practice of adding it to tap water to prevent tooth decay. The agency based its conclusion on studies involving fluoride levels at about twice the recommended limit for drinking water.
On Sept. 24, Chen sided with several advocacy groups that filed a lawsuit against the EPA, which had argued that it wasn’t clear what effect fluoride exposure might have at lower levels. However, the federal agency is required to make sure there is a margin between the hazard level and exposure level.
“If there is an insufficient margin, then the chemical poses a risk,” he wrote.
“Simply put, the risk to health at exposure levels in United States drinking water is sufficiently high to trigger regulatory response by the EPA” under federal law, according to Chen.
He said that “scientific literature in the record provides a high level of certainty that a hazard is present” and that “fluoride is associated with reduced IQ.”
Chen stressed that his ruling does not stipulate that fluoridated water can cause lower IQ in children with certainty but is only weighing the potential risk.
“This order does not dictate precisely what that response must be,” the judge said.
While fluoride can come from a number of sources, drinking water is the primary source of the compound for Americans, researchers say. About two-thirds of the U.S. population has fluoridated drinking water,
according to data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Since 2015, federal health officials have
recommended a fluoridation level of 0.7 milligrams per liter of water. For five decades before that, the recommended upper range was 1.2. The World Health Organization has set a safe limit for fluoride in drinking water of 1.5.
Separately, the EPA has a longstanding requirement that water systems cannot have more than 4 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water. It is a maximum contaminant level. That standard is designed to prevent skeletal fluorosis, a potentially crippling disorder that causes weaker bones, stiffness, and pain. The EPA also has a
secondary standard that is not federally enforceable, but the agency requires a special notice to be posted when a water system has more than 2 milligrams of fluoride per liter of water.
The judge’s ruling was made just weeks after a National Toxicology Program
report found that exposing children to high levels of fluoride, which it defined as 1.5 milligrams per liter, is “consistently associated” with a lower IQ in children and other neurological issues.
“This review finds, with moderate confidence, that higher estimated fluoride exposures ... are consistently associated with lower IQ in children,” the report reads.
There is also evidence that exposure “is associated with other neurodevelopmental and cognitive effects in children,” it found, but it stressed that “there is low confidence in the literature for these other effects.”
The court case, which was brought in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, began in 2017. The lead plaintiff was the nonprofit environmental advocacy organization Food & Water Watch.
Chen had paused the proceedings in 2020 to await the results of the National Toxicology Program report before releasing his opinion.
Over the years, there have been studies that have found that fluoride exposure could affect the brain development of children, including very young children and fetuses. Earlier this year, a study
published in JAMA found that fluoride could be associated with “neurobehavioral problems” among children.
“We found that each 0.68 milligram per liter increase in fluoride levels in the pregnant women’s urine was associated with nearly double the odds of children scoring in the clinical or borderline clinical range for neurobehavioral problems at age 3, based on their mother’s reporting,” the study’s lead author, Ashley Malin,
said in a statement.
The American Dental Association, which backs the fluoridation of water,
refuted the JAMA study’s findings in a statement in May, noting that the paper uses only a “small sample size” and was “not nationally representative.”
“The American Dental Association endorses community water fluoridation as a safe, beneficial, and cost-effective public health measure for preventing dental caries,” it stated.
The Epoch Times contacted EPA officials for comment on Sept. 25 but didn’t receive a reply by publication time.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
