Children in Wisconsin are being failed.
And the children who may be most vulnerable are the children whose families have the fewest resources to question what comes out of their faucets, purchase alternative water, install expensive filtration systems or navigate conflicting scientific information.
At the center of this problem is not simply fluoride.
It is institutional complacency, professional allegiance and the willingness of influential people to delay action when the evidence becomes inconvenient.
One of the most prominent examples is Matt Crespin of the Children’s Health Alliance of Wisconsin.
Crespin is a dental hygienist by training who has spent years advocating for community water fluoridation. His professional background is oral health. But when the question is whether chronic fluoride exposure can affect the developing brain, that is not merely a dental question.
It is a question for toxicologists, neurologists, epidemiologists, developmental scientists and other experts who study the brain and environmental exposures.
After the 2020 fluoride trial, the logos came out
In 2020, after our two-week federal fluoride trial, Crespin sent a letter to Green Bay decision-makers urging them to continue fluoridating the city’s drinking water.
The letter was not presented as merely the opinion of one dental hygienist.
It invoked the Wisconsin Oral Health Coalition and displayed the support of some of Wisconsin’s most recognizable health and professional institutions, including:
Children’s Wisconsin
Marquette University School of Dentistry
Wisconsin Public Health Association
Wello
Wisconsin Medical Society
Wisconsin chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics
Think about what that communicates to an elected official.
It says:
Look at all these respected health organizations. Surely the science must be settled.
But logos are not evidence.
A prestigious organization appearing on a letter does not independently validate every scientific claim contained in that letter. A coalition is not a systematic review. Professional consensus is not a toxicological study.
And the public has every right to ask each organization:
Did you independently review the evidence concerning fluoride and neurodevelopment before allowing your name and reputation to be used to support continued fluoridation?
If the answer is yes, show us that analysis.
If the answer is no, then why should the public interpret the logo as scientific validation?
This was not new behavior
This is particularly concerning because Crespin had already been making strong claims about fluoride for years.
According to the April 8, 2013 Green Bay Water Commission meeting minutes, Crespin told commissioners there was “a lot of misinformation” about fluoride and suggested that negative conclusions were being deliberately extrapolated from research.
He argued that studies could involve countries with fluoride concentrations hundreds of times higher than the Water Utility used.
He also told the commission that someone would have to drink enough water to reach a lethal volume before fluoride would become toxic in the body.
Those statements reveal the framework through which the issue was being presented to Wisconsin decision-makers.
The question was framed around acute toxicity rather than the much more complicated question of chronic exposure and developmental toxicity.
That distinction matters enormously when discussing children.
A chemical does not have to cause immediate poisoning before scientists should investigate whether chronic exposure can alter development.
And now we have another warning
Fast-forward to August 2026.
A new study from researchers participating in the NIH-funded ECHO program examined prenatal fluoride exposure and children’s cognition. Researchers from 17 sites across 23 states examined more than 2,500 children and reported an association between higher prenatal fluoride exposure and differences in children’s cognitive scores.
The Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health highlighted the findings as a potential concern for children exposed to higher fluoride levels during pregnancy.
This is precisely the kind of study that should make anyone responsible for children’s health pause.
Not because one study settles the entire scientific debate.
It doesn’t.
The appropriate scientific response is to examine the methodology, exposure assessment, dose-response relationship, potential confounding, biological plausibility, consistency with previous studies and the totality of the evidence.
In other words:
Stop. Look. Investigate.
But what did the Children’s Health Alliance of Wisconsin do?
It held a webinar promoting community water fluoridation.
On August 27, 2026—just days after the Columbia University study was receiving public attention—the Children’s Health Alliance presented:
“Championing Community Water Fluoridation: Stories, Strategies and Lessons from the Field.”
And who was brought in to teach communities how to advocate for fluoridation?
Dental hygienists.
Morgan Brooke, RDH, of DeForest, and Michelle Krell, RDH, of Ladysmith.
The description says the session would teach oral-health professionals how to educate communities, communicate “evidence-based information,” collaborate with local leaders and advocate for policies that support community water fluoridation.
That should make Wisconsin taxpayers, parents and policymakers stop and ask a very simple question:
Where are the neurologists?
Where are the toxicologists?
Where are the developmental neuropsychologists?
Where are the epidemiologists?
Where are the scientists whose careers are devoted to studying environmental exposures and the developing brain?
If the concern is fluoride exposure during pregnancy and childhood cognition, why is the institutional response to train people who clean teeth to become better advocates for continuing fluoride exposure?
This isn’t an attack on dental hygienists.
Dental hygienists perform valuable work.
But expertise in dental hygiene is not the same thing as expertise in developmental neurotoxicology.
A person can be an excellent dental hygienist and still not be qualified to determine whether prenatal fluoride exposure alters fetal brain development.
That distinction should not be controversial.
The question is not whether fluoride prevents cavities
This is where the debate continually gets diverted.
Yes, fluoride has a relationship to dental caries.
Yes, dental disease matters.
Yes, low-income children can experience significant barriers to dental care.
Those facts do not answer the question of whether fluoride should be deliberately added to drinking water when evidence raises concerns about prenatal and developmental exposure.
The question is one of risk versus benefit.
And once potential neurodevelopmental harm enters the equation, the conversation must expand beyond dentistry.
You cannot answer a question about fetal brain development by looking exclusively at teeth.
The bystander effect has consequences
This is where the bystander effect becomes relevant.
When one person raises a concern, people may investigate.
But when that same concern is surrounded by the logos of Children’s Wisconsin, Marquette, the Wisconsin Medical Society, the Wisconsin Public Health Association and other respected institutions, responsibility becomes diffuse.
A city council member thinks:
The medical organizations support it.
A public-health official thinks:
The pediatricians support it.
A parent thinks:
Surely Children’s Wisconsin wouldn’t support something harmful to children.
And everyone assumes somebody else has thoroughly examined the evidence.
That is the bystander effect at an institutional level.
Everyone sees the warning.
Everyone assumes someone else is responsible for determining whether it is legitimate.
And nobody acts.
Then there is normalcy bias
There is another psychological trap: normalcy bias.
Wisconsin has fluoridated communities.
It has had them for decades.
Millions of people have consumed fluoridated water.
Dentists have recommended fluoride for generations.
Therefore, people assume it must be safe.
But “we have always done it” is not a scientific argument.
A practice can become so deeply embedded in government policy and professional culture that questioning it feels more threatening than continuing it.
The longer something has been done, the more difficult it becomes for institutions to admit that perhaps the risk was underestimated.
That is normalcy bias.
And it is particularly dangerous when the potential victims are children who cannot make the decision for themselves.
Who pays the price?
This is where the issue becomes an ethical one.
A wealthy family can buy bottled water.
They can purchase reverse-osmosis equipment.
They can investigate filtration technologies.
They can pay for private medical consultations.
They can seek second opinions.
A low-income family may not have those options.
That means a policy imposed uniformly on an entire community does not necessarily distribute its risks equally.
The family with the fewest resources has the fewest choices.
So when public-health officials say fluoridation is particularly important for disadvantaged children, they should also be required to answer a much harder question:
What happens when the public-health intervention itself carries a potential developmental risk?
You cannot invoke vulnerable children as the reason to continue a policy while dismissing evidence that the same policy may expose those children to harm.
The organizations need to answer for themselves
This is not a demand that every organization named on Crespin’s letter agree with me.
It is a demand for accountability.
Children’s Wisconsin: Did your representatives independently review the neurotoxicity evidence before supporting continued fluoridation?
Marquette University School of Dentistry: Did the dental school evaluate the toxicological and neurodevelopmental literature, or was its involvement based primarily on established dental policy?
Wisconsin Public Health Association: What evidence did you review concerning developmental neurotoxicity at fluoridation levels used in Wisconsin?
Wello: What independent scientific evaluation supported your participation?
Wisconsin Medical Society: What evidence did you rely upon when supporting this position?
Wisconsin chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics: How did you evaluate the potential risks to fetuses, infants and developing children?
And now I would add another question to the Children’s Health Alliance of Wisconsin:
After the August 2026 Columbia study raised new concerns about prenatal fluoride exposure and children’s cognition, why was the response another fluoridation advocacy training rather than a scientific forum involving neurologists, toxicologists and developmental scientists?
These are reasonable questions.
They are not attacks on medicine.
They are not attacks on dentistry.
They are not attacks on public health.
They are exactly the questions public-health institutions should welcome.
The problem isn’t that Crespin has an opinion
Matt Crespin is entitled to believe that fluoridation is beneficial.
He is entitled to advocate for it.
He is entitled to defend the policy.
What concerns me is something much bigger:
What happens when an influential advocate can assemble the reputational power of some of Wisconsin’s most trusted health organizations behind one position, while the underlying scientific controversy is presented to decision-makers as though it barely exists?
That is how institutional power can overwhelm scientific scrutiny.
Crespin has spent years advocating for fluoridation.
That makes his influence real.
And because his influence is real, his responsibility should be greater—not smaller.
Wisconsin cannot protect children by refusing to look
The federal fluoride litigation forced the issue into a courtroom because regulators and institutions had failed to adequately confront the questions being raised.
After the 2020 trial, the debate did not disappear.
The evidence continued to accumulate.
And eventually, in 2024, the federal court found that plaintiffs had proven, by a preponderance of the evidence, that fluoridation at 0.7 mg/L presented an unreasonable risk of injury to health under the Toxic Substances Control Act.
That does not mean every question about fluoride has been answered.
It does mean that dismissing concerns about neurotoxicity as nothing more than misinformation or the work of a tiny fringe group is no longer intellectually defensible.
The appropriate response to troubling evidence is investigation.
Not intimidation.
Not appeals to authority.
Not a wall of organizational logos.
And certainly not another seminar teaching dental professionals how to sell the policy to their communities.
We need people willing to say: “What if we’re wrong?”
The people making these decisions are not the ones who will have to live their entire lives with the consequences.
The children are.
That is why Wisconsin has reached a point where protecting the status quo is no longer good enough.
We need institutions willing to reopen the question.
We need professionals willing to examine evidence outside their traditional disciplines.
We need policymakers willing to ask uncomfortable questions.
And we need organizations to stop hiding behind consensus and start showing the public the evidence that justifies their position.
Because if the evidence truly supports continued fluoridation, those organizations should have nothing to fear from a rigorous examination of it.
But if institutional reputation has become a substitute for scientific scrutiny, then Wisconsin has a much bigger problem than fluoride.
We have a public-health system suffering from the bystander effect, trapped by normalcy bias, and too afraid to admit that it might have gotten something wrong.
And while the adults protect the status quo, Wisconsin’s children are the ones who have to live with the consequences.
Original article online at: https://tulsaworld.com/news/state-regional/government-politics/article_a4fe99a0-91ef-41e5-8c17-d86a7695962c.html