Dear Reader
• Utah had one of the worst fluoridation overfeed accidents in US history.
• From long before the accident, and continuously afterward, FAN has been laying the groundwork for stopping fluoridation.
A recent academic paper describes how a major fluoridation technological failing and recent fluoride science helped push Utah to be the first state to ever ban fluoridation. Utah’s ban is even more consequential because it reversed mandatory fluoridation in the state’s largest population counties.
The paper, by Brigham Young University engineering professor Robert B. Sowby, PhD, is titled Fluoride failure: From Sandy City’s water system incident to statewide ban and beyond. It describes in detail the series of technical and human errors in the city of Sandy Utah, in 2019, that caused a fluoride overfeed accident that raised tap water fluoride concentrations as high as 150 mg/L. That is more than 300x greater than the intended concentration of 0.7 mg/L and far higher than the EPA’s allowed maximum. A health report found the overfeed sickened at least 239 people with symptoms including vomiting and headaches. At least one child experienced serious long-term effects. He gave riveting testimony at Utah Senate hearings that helped gain passage of the ban.
Texts from Sandy UT water department worker upon discovering fluoridation overfeed:
FAN covered the accident extensively and provided some of the only coverage outside of Utah, in what was effectively a mainstream media blackout despite the CDC itself describing the accident as “the largest fluoride overfeed event in the nation’s history”. When a Sandy water department worker first discovered the fluoridation overfeed that explained why complaints had been pouring in of the water making people sick, she texted her boss saying “OMG” “We overdosed them” [Parsons report 2019]
FAN has catalogued dozens of fluoridation overfeeds and chemical spills that demonstrate the Sandy overfeed was far from the first time people have received acute toxic overdoses. An overfeed in an Alaskan native village in 1992 produced levels of fluoride similar to those measured in Sandy, and killed one man while sickening hundreds of others. Instead of being recognized as a cautionary tale the Alaska overfeed episode was ignored and suppressed by fluoridation proponents who insist fluoridation is fail-safe. States shouldn’t have to experience their own “Sandy fluoridation disaster” before they follow Utah’s lead and ban fluoridation.
Acute toxicity from overfeeds garners local headlines, but the much greater harm from fluoridation is happening every day in every fluoridated area in a subtle but insidious manner. Pregnant women and infants ingesting fluoridated water run the very real risk of the child’s IQ being lowered. The federal court thoroughly reviewed all the evidence and arguments from both sides, given under oath by experts, and ruled that fluoridation at 0.7 mg/L poses an unreasonable risk of lowering child IQ. The risk is not hypothetical and is not only applicable to water with fluoride concentration above 1.5 mg/L.
This effect may be too subtle to easily spot in any individual, and a few IQ points lost by the average person might seem unimportant. However, because everyone varies in their sensitivity to any toxic substance, some percentage of the most sensitive children may end up losing 10 or 15 IQ points. Even for all those with more typical sensitivity who might only lose 1 or 2 IQ points and never be recognized, economists still estimate they’ll lose $20,000 to $40,000 in lifetime earnings. This far outweighs any miniscule saving from perhaps one fewer cavity prevented by fluoridation and amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars a year lost to society because fluoridation is imposed on over 200 million people in the US.
The new paper by Sowby tip-toes around the health harms caused by the Sandy fluoridation overfeed and never even mentions the voluminous scientific evidence reviewed by the National Toxicology Program that shows even normal fluoridation operation poses an unacceptable risk of diminished IQ. Nevertheless, the paper is important for highlighting the overfeed accident’s important role in the decision to ban fluoridation in Utah.
For the past 25 years, FAN has been the world’s leading information source on fluoride science as well as the leading advocacy group seeking to stop fluoridation. FAN played a key role in bringing scientific balance to the 2006 National Research Council (NRC) review of fluoride toxicity, which helped inspire the most important NIH-funded studies of fluoride neurotoxicity. After the evidence of neurotoxicity had accumulated to a significant extent, FAN nominated it to the National Toxicology Program (NTP) and simultaneously launched the federal lawsuit against the EPA for allowing an unreasonable risk of reduced IQ because had failed to ban fluoridation. Both of these essential efforts required years of intense work from FAN, but both culminated in vindication of FAN’s position that artificial fluoridation was likely to cause diminished IQ in at least some children. Few would have predicted that within one year of the final NTP report and success in the lawsuit against EPA that two states would be banning fluoridation, many local water systems stopping fluoridation, and many other states and local water systems discussing stopping fluoridation. On the individual scale, many more people have become skeptical of the long-standing mantra that fluoridation is “safe and effective”.
There is still much more to do, and the backlash from the die-hard fluoridation defenders and the too-often-gullible mainstream media has been enormous.
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