As top federal health officials are encouraging states to stop adding fluoride to public water, a Maine lawmaker introduced a bill Tuesday that would prohibit the practice in the state, drawing strong pushback from the dental community.
Introducing her bill during a public hearing with the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee, Rep. Jennifer Poirier (R-Skowhegan) said in written remarks that fluoridating drinking water is an outdated practice that undermines informed consent.
“Fluoridating drinking water amounts to mass medication without the ability to monitor individual dosage or gain consent,” Poirier wrote in testimony read on her behalf by Rep. Kathy Javner (R-Chester).
Poirier’s bill, LD 1570, would repeal the law governing the process for a public water system to add fluoride, prohibit systems from adding fluoride and institute a civil penalty for intentionally violating the prohibition.
Communities have been adding fluoride to drinking water for decades to help prevent cavities by strengthening the surface of teeth and making them more resistant to decay. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website calls it “a practical, cost-effective, and equitable way for communities to improve their residents’ oral health.”
More than 60 community water systems that provide drinking water to more than 520,000 people in Maine currently add fluoride, according to information on the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention website.
Current state law allows public water systems to decide whether to fluoridate drinking water with voter approval from the affected municipalities. Voters in Southwest Harbor, for example, decided to stop adding fluoride to their water in 2013 after more than 50 years of doing so, as reported by the Ellsworth American.
With a shortage of dental providers in the state, multiple pediatric dentists and nonprofit dental organizations opposed the proposed ban, arguing it is the only source of oral healthcare many children in the state receive. Eliminating fluoride would cause more cavities, pain and other ramifications that come with tooth decay that they argued would be harder to treat with already long waitlists for patients to access dental care.
Dr. Ashley Blanchfield with Augusta Pediatric Dentistry said she lived and worked in Juneau, Alaska, for several years after it stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water in 2007. She told the committee that she fears Maine could see the same negative effects she saw in children’s dental health in Alaska in the post-fluoridation years.
Poirier’s bill comes after Utah passed a law in March becoming the first state in the nation to prohibit adding fluoride to drinking water.
Earlier this month, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called on states to follow Utah’s lead by banning fluoride in drinking water and told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention he wanted it to stop recommending it be added to public water.
This comes after Kennedy criticized fluoride throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, saying it has been associated with negative health impacts. While ingesting too much fluoride can be harmful, those risks are associated with levels much higher than the CDC recommendation for drinking water.
Fluoride is naturally occurring in most water, but it is usually at levels too low to prevent cavities, which is why health officials have put forth suggestions for adding more. The CDC said it recommends fluoride levels equal to about three drops in a 55-gallon barrel; however, it is up to individual communities whether they adjust their levels to that recommendation.
The CDC also named fluoridation of community drinking water one of 10 great public health interventions of the 20th century because of the decline in cavities since it started in 1945.
Original article online at: https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/amid-federal-push-against-fluoridated-drinking-water-maine-legislature-considers-ban