Pien Huang
speaker
78 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Pien Huang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think they're interesting. I think that, like, it's useful to have a real scientific debate about these questions. You know, as a science reporter, you're like, OK, great. These are the questions. Let's get more evidence.
But my concern is that even in the lack of evidence, you know, there's this huge public debate that's swirling and political and sort of happening regardless of whether the evidence becomes clear or not.
Yeah, so there's a couple things that are coming up. The Environmental Protection Agency has this deadline coming up in the next two weeks. over whether they want to appeal this recent court decision that told them to tighten their fluoride regulations that could have bearing on the debate. And then there's Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
He's President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for health secretary, and he told NPR that one of his priorities is to get the country to stop fluoridating the water. So... We'll have to see what happens there. And finally, there's also what's happening on the local level. So there are some communities that are going through transitions with their drinking water.
For example, NPR has reported that Calgary in Canada removed fluoride from its water supply. And then after data came back showing that dental cavities rose significantly, they're now reintroducing it. On the other hand, you've got Florida Surgeon General Joseph Latipo, who made headlines recently for advising local governments in Florida to stop adding fluoride to their water supplies.
So yeah, there's a lot happening with fluoride right now. It's going to be interesting to track those decisions and what the public health outcomes are. So we will see what happens.
You're welcome. Thanks for having me on. And I'm sure we're going to talk much more about fluoride in the future.
Yeah, I mean, there are so many buckets to look into, from forever chemicals to lead to fluoride.
Yeah, I mean, it has gotten better since the pandemic. So there was this nationally representative survey that the Pew Research Center did at the end of October. And it found that 76% of respondents were at least fairly confident in scientists. You know, they thought that they were intelligent, focused on solving real world problems.
So like I said, that's up, but it's still lower than it was before the pandemic. And people in the US are split about whether scientists should be actively focusing on policy or if they should be staying out of the fray. And now people in public health Wow. Wow.
Yeah, absolutely. So this has been a big year for drinking water. There were two big new rules from the EPA in April. They passed a rule to limit the amount of Six PFAS chemicals, that stands for per-polyfluoroalkyl substances. We've talked about them here before.
And these are man-made chemicals that have been used for many, many decades in waterproofing, stain-proofing products that people can buy in the store or use in flame retardants. They're called forever chemicals because they have this really strong carbon-fluorine bond that can stay bonded and intact for centuries. So they don't really fall apart in nature. They are in most human bodies.
They've been linked to liver damage, high cholesterol, certain cancers, suppressed immune response in children. So the new PFAS regulation requires water systems that find even low levels of PFAS in the water to filter them out. Oh, wow.
So the other one is lead, which we have known about for a really long time. We know that lead is a neurotoxin. It's especially dangerous for kids and their developing brains, and it can leach out of lead pipes and into people's drinking water. So- A little background here.
Lead pipes in drinking water have been banned since the mid-1980s, but there are still more than 9 million lead pipes that were installed before that that are still in use and in the ground. So the EPA also passed a new rule this year that requires all of those 9 million lead pipes to be dug up, replaced with non-lead pipes within the next 10 years.
So all of that is really great, but there is work that remains. You know, there are other chemicals of concern in the water. some questions about what might happen to the work on PFAS on lead when the new Trump administration takes effect. Some of these things are being challenged in court right now, so we will see if what has been passed this year is kept and whether that momentum keeps going.
Yeah, exactly. Now, that is a whole separate can of worms, fluoride and drinking water. So A lot of communities have added it to drinking water since the 1940s to cut down on cavities. And RFK Jr. has said that if he is confirmed, he's going to push to get it out of the drinking water.
And we're already seeing some states like Florida, their state surgeon general already has encouraged places to stop adding fluoride to the water. So there could be a lot of changes there. We'll see.
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