Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced this week that he will soon direct the Centers for Disease Control to stop recommending fluoride be added to public drinking water.
This announcement comes as lawmakers in Ohio, South Carolina, and Florida are proposing restrictions on fluoridated water. In March, Utah became the first state to ban the addition of fluoride to the state's public water systems.
Rich Razgaitis, CEO of FloWater, said there is an undeniable benefit for adding fluoride to public drinking water for children, but not as much for adults. Razgaitis' company sells water filtration devices, which removes chemicals such as fluoride from water.
"The data is really clear on fluoride being beneficial to children's teeth," he said. "I think the real argument is, do you want to systemically put this in everyone's drinking water, or do you want to allow it to be applied topically by dental offices? And so I think there's a really good reason to be able to remove fluoride from everyone's drinking water, particularly because it doesn't help beyond the age of adolescence."
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Razgaitis notes that not all children have access to dental care.
"If we're talking about removing it in one area of our lives and giving people free choice, we also need to be having a conversation about what it means for children," he said. "How do they access it? And how do we make sure that marginalized communities have the same access?"
Razgaitis notes that the debate over fluoride prompts bigger questions about chemicals in drinking water.
"We really should be having a conversation around is how do we eliminate this chemical cocktail that is affecting hundreds of millions of Americans and restore America's drinking water?" he said. "And there's a variety of ways of doing that through policy reform regulations, as well as in investing in a very broken and old-aged infrastructure."
Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that water supplies contain 0.7 milligrams of fluoride for every liter. The CDC says this level maximizes fluoride's oral health benefits while minimizing potential harms.
The recommendation has been around for nearly 60 years and was last updated in 2013.
The CDC does not mandate that local and state agencies add fluoride to drinking water.
The American Cancer Society says that adding fluoride to water at levels higher than current recommendations could pose a risk of osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer, but the evidence is unclear. The organization says that there are only 500 cases of the cancer a year, making it difficult to fully study its causes.
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