In DeForest, a single molecule in a glass of water is causing major division.
That’s because elected officials in the Dane County village joined a growing number of community leaders in Wisconsin and around the United States when they voted to remove fluoride from public drinking water.
The movement driving these decisions reverses a longstanding belief that fluoridating community water improves oral health, particularly for those unable to go to the dentist regularly, but for others as well.
“It’s every age, every person, every socio-economic group — it benefits everyone who has community water fluoridation,” said Tom Reid, a Madison dentist who is president of the Wisconsin Dental Association.
Despite decades of research that supports Reid’s conclusion, critics point to other studies they say underscore the health risks of consuming too much of the chemical. And now they’ve gained a powerful ally: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed earlier this month as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy said he will recommend fluoride be removed from water across the country. The final decision would still be left to local officials, who decide how to run municipal water utilities.
Those officials in DeForest are now siding with fluoride skeptics.
“Science is not static — it evolves with new discoveries,” Rebecca Witherspoon, a member of the DeForest Village Board, said during the Feb. 4 vote on removing fluoride from the community’s drinking water. “Dismissing updated research simply because it challenges the longstanding consensus does a disservice to public health.”
The overwhelming majority of Wisconsin residents who get their water from a local government and not a private well — or about 8 out of 10 people in the state — drink fluoridated water. But that percentage has been declining for years.
In DeForest, the debate has turned heated, with allegations of online harassment, contentious public meetings and, now, a push to oust anti-fluoride board members at the ballot box.
“This is not dissimilar from how the rest of the country is experiencing government and lack of civility and are addressing issues in a very polarized kind of manner,” said Jane Cahill Wolfgram, who chairs the DeForest Village Board. “I mean, you see issues that people use to compromise on being life or death or it’s black and white. Not ‘Well, here’s how we can make this work for everyone.’”
Fluoride debate heats up in Wisconsin, U.S.
Statewide, 84.9% of Wisconsinites on public water systems drank fluoridated water as of 2022, the most recent year the state Department of Health Services has data available. This is a drop of about 5 percentage points since 2011.
In Dane County, 98.8% of residents live somewhere with fluoridated water but that number is far lower in other parts of the state. In Shawano County, just 2.7% of residents drink fluoridated water; in nine counties, no residents do.
The idea of adding small amounts of fluoride to drinking water dates to the 1940s in the United States. The federal government has encouraged the practice as a way to improve oral health and prevent tooth decay.
“You probably remember your grandparents or great grandparents who probably had dentures,” Reid said. “Mine did because they had a very high decay rate. They lost a lot of teeth and they ended up with dentures. We almost don’t ever see that anymore. … So really, community water fluoridation has been such a success story.”
Fluoride proponents point to a 2007 study that found adding the chemical reduces cavities by 25% in adults and kids. It does this by strengthening the outer surface of a tooth, called enamel.
More recently, researchers in Israel found a rise in dental problems for young people after the country stopped fluoridating its water in 2014. In England, researchers found benefits to fluoride but noted those health gains were more muted than what has historically been observed.
The U.S. government recommends fluoride levels of 0.7 milligrams per liter for drinking, and research indicates most water systems have levels at or near that amount.
Consuming higher levels of fluoride has long been linked with negative consequences, such as dental fluorosis, where the tooth enamel becomes stained.
But recent research from the federal National Toxicology Program indicates there might be a relationship between higher levels of fluoride and lowered IQ in children.
The report evaluated all different sources where a person might get fluoride, including drinking water. The authors emphasized “there were insufficient data to determine” whether the current fluoride guidelines were a problem, and they wrote that more research is needed to understand any health risks associated with exposure to lower levels of fluoride.
Higher levels of fluoride are also linked with skeletal fluorosis, a chronic condition that leads to bone damage. Some studies have also pointed to potential links to a specific type of bone cancer.
Critics of the studies have said the methodology is lacking or the results don’t establish sufficient causation. Others say more review is needed.
Reid said he supports further research while he also believes it’s important to observe the positive track record of low levels of fluoridated water in the U.S.
“For us to not want more research would be not really truly acting in the best benefit of science,” he said.
DeForest’s fluoride vote turns contentious
In DeForest, the debate began last year, when staff members recommended that fluoride be removed to avoid nearly $10,000 in repairs to the pumps that add the chemical to the water.
The board initially considered approving the request without much fanfare but stopped amid public outcry.
“Fluoride activists have descended on our village and have tried to make changes without public knowledge and unfortunately, our board members nearly let them,” Emily Waide, a DeForest resident, said at a public hearing in January.
Other residents advocated for removing the fluoride.
“We are endangering our village’s young and I feel that if more village members really understood we could not safely feed our babies the village water, they would want it removed also,” DeForest resident Jennifer McFarland told board members during the public hearing.
A Green Bay activist, Brenda Staudenmaier, who was part of a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency over the chemical, privately urged board members to vote for fluoride removal.
Residents say they have been harassed, either online or in-person, over the issue.
DeForest Police Chief James Olson said he was unaware of any reports to the department related to the fluoride controversy. But Cahill Wolfgram, the board president, said hearing reports of residents getting “beat up” online has left her feeling helpless.
“I have wanted people to come forward and I know other members of the board have wanted people to come forward,” she said. “And now that they have really started to come forward on an issue and they get pounded for doing it, it’s more difficult to convince them to keep sharing their opinions with us.”
Two board members who supported removing fluoride are on the ballot unopposed in April.
But Alicia Williams, a local community health worker, has said she will mount a write-in campaign in the wake of the controversy.
Fluoride isn’t the only reason Williams said she is running, but she said the debate locally was a “a wakeup call to everyone.”
“I went to the vote and saw it just looks like some people on the board have made some decisions not really based on what their constituents had said,” Williams said. “And so I think it just brought my attention to that issue and I feel like I want to get out and tell people, ‘Look, I want to be your voice.’”
Public health officials fear absence of fluoride
Debates over fluoride are nothing new. In 1966, a group of residents sought a court order stopping Wisconsin Dells from adding fluoride to the local water supply.
And not all debates have been as contentious as they have been in DeForest. Last year, officials in Marshall, on the far eastern edge of Dane County, voted unanimously to remove fluoride from their drinking water.
Concern centered on a state Department of Natural Resources regulation that bars municipalities from storing fluoride and chlorine in the same room. Chlorine is also commonly added to drinking water. Mixed together, the two can create a poisonous gas.
In 2022, voters in the village of Black Earth overwhelmingly supported an advisory referendum to keep fluoride in their drinking water.
When local residents presented the case for and against fluoride at a meeting in November, local officials felt obligated to stand by the public vote, said Terry Moyer, chair of the Black Earth Village Board.
“The issue has not been brought before us again since last fall,” Moyer said in an email.
More recently, officials in Wisconsin Rapids rejected a proposal to remove fluoride, pointing to support from local dentists and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In DeForest, the village will stop adding fluoride on March 7. Public health officials fear the decision to remove fluoride will particularly harm those who cannot afford to go to the dentist or buy toothpaste that contains the chemical.
Morgan Finke, a spokesperson for Public Health Madison & Dane County, said the department reached out to DeForest leaders to offer help informing residents about the change.
It was too soon to say if the public health agency would need to do anything differently to support communities that remove fluoride, Finke said.
A group of residents has pushed for village officials to put fluoridation on the ballot, allowing residents to weigh in. State lawmakers banned informal advisory referendums in 2023, and Cahill Wolfgram said she was evaluating the legal options for giving voters a say, which she said is a good idea.
She said it’s unlikely the board will take up the matter in the next six weeks, though she predicted the issue will resurface for local officials.
“We still have the equipment and we still have the capacity that, should we make a decision to reinstate fluoride, we can do that,” Cahill Wolfgram said. “We can start it again.”
Reid, the Madison dentist, said he thinks there is a real chance DeForest will reverse itself, pointing to other communities in Wisconsin that have done sopreviously.
“There is considerable backlash from this, and I think that citizens are making their voices heard,” he said. “I think that they are respecting the science.”
Original article online at: https://captimes.com/news/fluoride-opponents-score-a-victory-in-deforest-across-u-s/article_067aefac-f948-11ef-bdcc-3b0a07089559.html