Meryl Horn (Senior Producer, PhD)
speaker
109 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Meryl Horn (Senior Producer, PhD)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So in 1945, Grand Rapids, Michigan was the first city in the U.S. to add fluoride to the water. And people were really excited. The government released a PSA about it.
It's working. Yeah, they found that it slashed rates of tooth decay by as much as 70%. Wow.
And after that, we started fluoridating water in most of the US, Australia, Ireland, and a lot of places in Brazil and Canada. And the CDC lists this as one of our greatest public health achievements of the past century, along with vaccines and figuring out that tobacco is bad.
Well, there's actually been some opposition to this from the start, but recently things are really heating up, even at the highest levels. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, he thinks that fluoride is dangerous.
But he's not alone. There's a whole kind of chorus of people saying that adding fluoride to the water has been a huge mistake because fluoride is actually really bad for us.
And on top of all the dangers of fluoride, people are also saying now that it doesn't even work to prevent cavities anymore. Now that we have better dental care.
Is fluoride really the hero that we once thought it was? And so now fluoride is being taken out of the water in some places in Australia and now Utah in the U.S.
Yeah, that's the question. And just to say that, like, the research on this was, like, not at all what I was expecting it to be.
Well, I mean, like a lot of stuff, at really high levels, fluoride can kill you. So the most dramatic example that I found of this was in the 90s, there was a town in Alaska that accidentally dumped like way too much fluoride into the water supply. And like dozens of people got really sick. Someone even died.
The case study said that, quote, after 24 hours of intractable vomiting, a 41-year-old man was found dead at home.
It was way more than we normally put in. So like that water that that guy drank had roughly like 350 times more than what we aim for when we fluoridate water.
And at really high levels, it can stop your heart. Okay, right.
Yeah, that's the thing that everybody's fighting about with, you know, some people saying that it's not safe, some people saying that it is. But there is one downside that kind of everyone agrees is happening, even at these low levels of fluoride that we're putting in the water. And that's the thing that we mentioned at the top of the show where fluoride can stain your teeth.
And that can happen even at lower levels, too. And at that case, it's not like the photos that I showed you of like these brown teeth. It's just kind of like a whitish stain. Right. But like 10 years ago, we checked to see how many kids in the U.S. have this, and it was 70%.
And so the government took that seriously enough that they changed the recommendation for how much fluoride should go into the water. It was lowered 10 years ago.
Yeah, let's dive into that one since people are really worried about that and it's also where a lot of the research has been. So to walk us through this, I called up epidemiologist Ashley Mallon, an assistant professor at the University of Florida.
Yeah. So Ashley first remembers when she heard about this idea that fluoride might be bad for us. She was with a family member.
But, like, she was intrigued enough that Ashley started looking into the research. And at the time, there was a little bit there. Like, there was a study in the 90s that looked at over 500 rats and found that giving them fluoride could change their behavior. Like, it made some of them hyperactive.
And then she also found some studies in people, like in China, there are a lot of places with these really high levels of fluoride in the water.
Yeah. And some of those studies had been finding that people who lived in these areas had lower IQs.
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