Take Action
Medical & Scientific Professionals

Sign Our Professionals Statement


Over 4,800 medical and scientific professionals, including 580 medical doctors, 537 PhD scientists (including three co-authors of the National Research Council’s landmark review on fluoride toxicity), 378 dentists, 629 chiropractors, 860 registered nurses, 176 naturopathic doctors, 130 registered dental hygienists, and 106 pharmacists have gone on record since 2007 as opposing water fluoridation by signing FAN’s Professionals Statement to End Water Fluoridation.

Signers include:

  • Magda Aelvoet, MD, Former Minister of Public Health, Belgium
  • Arvid Carlsson, Nobel Laureate for Physiology or Medicine, 2000.
  • Doug Everingham, former Federal Health Minister, Australia
  • Andy Harris, MD, former national president, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Salem, OR
  • Hardy Limeback, PhD, DDS, Former President, Canadian Association of Dental Research
  • William Marcus, PhD, Former chief toxicologist of the EPA Water Division, Boyds, MD
  • Ted Schettler, MD, Science Director, Science and Environmental Health Network
  • Kathleen M. Thiessen, PhD, Senior Scientist. SENES Oak Ridge, Inc.
  • Quotes from some of these professionals.


Join Our Professional Speakers Panel


If you would like to help make an even bigger impact, please consider joining our professional speakers panel. This is a group of scientists, physicians, water treatment experts, and dentists who coordinate with FAN to provide testimony, letters, op-eds, and presentations to policymakers and the media.


The Growing Chorus of Experts Warning About Fluoridation


Since the start of fluoridation in the 1950’s, many independent scientists have voiced their reservations about the safety of dosing everyone in a community with fluoride.  This includes public health authorities from most of the developed world, which does not practice fluoridation

Nobel Prize-Winning Scientists


Proponents of fluoridation like to claim that no one who opposes fluoridation is credible. A number of prominent Nobel Prize-winning scientists, however, have opposed the practice. One such scientist, Dr. Arvid Carlsson, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology in 2000 for his research on neurotransmitters in the brain. In a 2005 interview, Dr. Arvid Carlsson noted that “fluoridation is against all modern principles of pharmacology. It’s obsolete. I don’t think anybody in Sweden, not a single dentist, would bring up this question anymore."

Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)


The Union of Scientists and Professionals at EPA’s Headquarters Office, which represents over 1,500 scientists at EPA, has gone on record as opposing water fluoridation due to concerns about fluoride’s health effects. According to the Union, “In summary, we hold that fluoridation is an unreasonable risk.”

Key Leaders in the Environmental Health Community


Key figures in the environmental health community have also gone on record as supporting an end to water fluoridation. This includes the following environmental health leaders who have added their name to FAN’s Professionals Statement:

  • Rosalie Bertell, PhD, Regent of the Board, International Physicians for Humanitarian Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland,
  • Theo Colborn, PhD, co-author, Our Stolen Future
  • Ken Cook, President, Environmental Working Group
  • Pat Costner, retired Senior Scientist, Greenpeace International
  • Ron Cummins, Director, Organic Consumers Association
  • Ingrid Eckerman, MD, MPH, President, Swedish Doctors for the Environment (LFM), Stockholm, Sweden
  • Sam Epstein, MD, author, “Politics of Cancer” and Chairman,Cancer Prevention Coalition
  • Jay Feldman, Executive Director, Beyond Pesticides
  • Lois Gibbs, Executive Director, Center for Health, Environment, and Justice
  • Andy Harris, MD, Former National President, Physicians for Social Responsibility
  • Vyvyan Howard, MD, PhD, Past President, International Society of Doctors for the Environment
  • Stephen Lester, Science Director, Center for Health, Environment, and Justice
  • Peter Montague, PhD, Director of Environmental Health Foundation
  • Ted Schettler, MD, Science Director, Science and Environmental Health Network
  • FIVE Goldman Prize winners (2006, 2003, 1997,1995, 1990)

Members of the National Research Council’s 2006 Review of Fluoride Toxicity


The following are quotes from 4 of the 12 scientists who wrote the NRC report, including the Panel Chair, Dr. John Doull:

“What the committee found is that we’ve gone with the status quo regarding fluoride for many years—for too long, really—and now we need to take a fresh look. In the scientific community, people tend to think this is settled. I mean, when the U.S. surgeon general comes out and says this is one of the 10 greatest achievements of the 20th century, that’s a hard hurdle to get over. But when we looked at the studies that have been done, we found that many of these questions are unsettled and we have much less information than we should, considering how long this [fluoridation] has been going on. I think that’s why fluoridation is still being challenged so many years after it began. In the face of ignorance, controversy is rampant.” 

– Dr. John Doull, NRC Panel Chair

The report “should be a wake-up call.”

– Dr. Robert Isaacson, NRC Panel Member.

“The NRC report is relevant to many aspects of the water fluoridation debate… [T]he report discusses the wide range of drinking water intake among members of the population, which means that groups with different fluoride concentrations in their drinking water may still have overlapping distributions of individual fluoride exposure. ln other words, the range of individual fluoride exposures at 1 mg/L will overlap the range of individual exposures at 2 mg/L or even 4 mg/L. Thus, even without consideration of differences in individual susceptibility to various effects, the margin of safety between 1 and 4 mg/L is very low.” 

– Dr. Kathleen Thiessen, NRC Panel Member.

“In my opinion, the evidence that fluoridation is more harmful than beneficial is now overwhelming.” 

– Dr. Hardy Limeback, NRC Panel Member.

Leading Experts in Toxicology and Environmental Neurotoxins


  • The former director of both the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program of the National Institutes of Health, Toxicologist and microbiologist, Linda Birnbaum, PhD, made a statement about fluoride neurotoxicity and her belief that fluoridation should end. Birnbaum had previously co-authored an op-ed appearing in the Environmental Health News entitled, It is time to protect kid’s developing brains from fluoride. It highlights the mounting evidence that fluoride is impairing brain development and compares the response from the public health community to its delayed response to the obvious harm caused by lead.

  • Bruce Lanphear, MD, MPH, is a physician, clinical scientist, professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and an award winning researcher who has been a member of two National Academies of Science Committees, is a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Lead Review Panel, and is renowned for his research on low-level lead exposure and many other environmental neurotoxins. He was invited to the Dallas City Council to make a presentation on fluoride neurotoxicity. His nonprofit scientific organization, Little Things Matter, created a short video describing the history of water fluoridation and highlights “new research that has found fluoride is toxic to the developing brain.”

  • Howard Hu, MD, Sc.D, MPH, is a medical doctor with a Masters in Public Health and a Doctorate of Science in Epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health. He has taught epidemiology at Harvard, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto, and the USC Keck School of Medicine where he currently serves as the Chair of Preventive Medicine. He has authored over 300 papers published in peer-reviewed journals and has published five studies on fluoride, including Bashash 2017 and 2018. Watch his recent interview on fluoride neurotoxicity.

  • In a 12-minute podcast, the editor of the Journal of American Medical Association’s Pediatrics, a Seattle physician, stated publicly he would not want his wife drinking fluoridated water if she were pregnant. The co-host, who is the Editor of the entire JAMA network and also a physician, raised the important issue of how low-income women cannot avoid fluoride while pregnant.

  • The abstract of the 2020 study that linked the use of fluoridated water in making infant formula to a lowering of IQ was re-published in the Journal of Pediatrics, in their column of “Current Best Evidence: Translating best evidence into best care.” It was submitted for publication in the column by researchers Howard Hu, MD, MPH, ScD and Morteza Bashash, PhD, MS.

  • Watch a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation with the senior author of several significant fluoride neurotoxicity studies, Professor Christine Till, Ph.D. She focuses on the current state of research on fluoride neurodevelopmental toxicity, including her own landmark studies looking at fetal and infant fluoride exposure. It also includes a discussion of potential adverse health outcomes associated with fluoride exposure, particularly during early childhood development. Dr. Till is an award-winning researcher with particular interest in children’s environmental health and is the principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant focused on testing the effects of fluoride exposure during pregnancy on thyroid function and child neurodevelopment. She’s an adjunct scientist to the Neurosciences and Mental Health Program at SickKids and an associate professor of Psychology at York University. She is the senior author of several significant fluoride studies, including the JAMA Pediatrics fluoride neurotoxicity study (Green 2019), the 2020 study,Fluoride exposure from infant formula and child IQ in a Canadian birth cohort, and the 2018 study, Community Water Fluoridation and Urinary Fluoride Concentrations in a National Sample of Pregnant Women in Canada.

  • A recent review of fluoridation by Danish scientist, Harvard professor, and neurotoxicity expert Philippe Grandjean, MD, DMSc, concluded that:…there is little doubt that developmental neurotoxicity is a serious risk associated with elevated fluoride exposure, whether due to community water fluoridation, natural fluoride release from soil minerals, or tea consumption, especially when the exposure occurs during early development.

  • Dr. Grandjean was also interviewed during FAN’s TSCA trial. His 18-minute statement can be viewed here.

  • A recent letter published in Pediatric Research by the co-authors of the JAMA Pediatrics fluoride/IQ study, stated:

  • Over the past 75 years, health authorities have declared that community water fluoridation-a practice that reaches over 400 million worldwide-is safe. Yet, studies conducted in North America examining the safety of fluoride exposure in pregnancy were nonexistent. When a Canadian study reported that higher fluoride exposure in pregnant women was associated with lower IQ scores in young children, critics attacked the methodology of the study and discounted the significance of the results. Health authorities continued to conclude that fluoride is unequivocally safe, despite four well-conducted studies over the last 3 years consistently linking fluoride exposure in pregnancy with adverse neurodevelopmental effects in offspring…The tendency to ignore new evidence that does not conform to widespread beliefs impedes the response to early warnings about fluoride as a potential developmental neurotoxin. Evolving evidence should inspire scientists and health authorities to re-evaluate claims about the safety of fluoride, especially for the fetus and infant for whom there is no benefit.

  • Dr William Ghali, MD, the former scientific director of the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary, and Dr. Aravind Ganesh, MD strongly admonished attempts to downplay the relevance and importance of emerging evidence of fluoride’s neurotoxicity while presenting their report on water fluoridation to the Calgary City Council

  • Award-winning toxicologist and a Diplomat of the American Board of Toxicology, Steve Gilbert, PhD–and his non-profit organization, the Institute of Neurotoxicology & Neurological Disorders–have produced a must-read statement opposing artificial fluoridation on his website Toxipedia. The four-page statement opposing fluoridation concisely examines the science, ethics, and history of fluoridation, and calls for direct action: “Discontinue water fluoridation, which will greatly reduce fluoride ingestion.”

  • One of the world’s leading neuroscientists, David Bellinger, PhD published a review article in the journal Pediatric Medicine where he included fluoride in a list of chemicals known or suspected to interfere with the neurodevelopment of children. The Harvard professor also wrote an editorial piece that accompanied the JAMA Pediatrics fluoride/IQ study where he provided an overview of recent fluoride/IQ research and gave the following warning.

See more:

With your support, FAN can help amplify, defend, and multiply these voices of scientific integrity.