This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Making our kids a little brighter may be as simple as turning off a tap! This is the tap that adds industrial-grade fluoride to the water supply of millions of Americans, supposedly to fight tooth decay. Most countries don't do anything so silly (including 97 percent of Europe) and yet their children's teeth are no worse than ours (see World Health Organization figures).
Mothers' milk contains virtually no fluoride. Why give this toxic substance to bottle-fed babies at about 250 times this level (1 ppm versus 0.004 ppm)?
Fluoride is newly classified as a developmental neurotoxin by medical authorities in the March 2014 journal Lancet Neurology. The authors from Harvard wrote, "A meta-analysis of 27 cross-sectional studies of children exposed to fluoride in drinking water, mainly from China, suggests an average IQ decrement of about seven points in children exposed to raised fluoride concentrations." The majority of these 27 studies had water fluoride levels which the U.S Environmental Protection Agency currently allows in the U.S. — less than 4 milligrams per liter.
The Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water could end this practice tomorrow if they used the IQ data in the Harvard report to determine a new safe drinking water goal (MCLG) for fluoride as recommended by the U.S. National Research Council in 2006.
Tell Congress to stop sending taxpayers' dollars to the CDC to promote fluoridation. Federal agencies should give us objective information.
Darlene Foster
Holladay