For more than 70 years, fluoride has been deliberately added to public water supplies on the assumption that it prevents tooth decay.
Presented as a safe and cost-effective public health measure, fluoridation has long enjoyed institutional protection from dental and pediatric associations, medical journals, many federal agencies, and town and county public health officials. Yet beneath the seemingly confident assurances lies a troubling reality. The fluoride used in municipal water is not a purified pharmaceutical drug but an industrial by-product of the aluminum and phosphate fertilizer industries. It is an industrial waste so toxic it cannot be dumped in soil or rivers. At certain concentrations, fluoride is more poisonous than arsenic.
Fluoridation has always carried the specter of a grand experiment. Entire populations have been exposed to this chemical without consent. Rarely has there been any transparency about what dose is received and what adverse systemic health effects may follow. Today, an ever-growing body of scientific studies in peer-reviewed journals links fluoride exposure to serious risks, which include ADHD and lowered IQ in children, thyroid and endocrine dysfunction, bone damage, skeletal fluorosis, and other chronic health conditions. One would think this evidence alone should have been enough to halt fluoridation.
But the story of fluoridation is not simply a matter of medical science and debate. It is a case study in how consensus is manufactured and defended. When dissenting scientists raise legitimate concerns, they are often marginalized. Their findings are delayed or discredited. Their careers are placed at risk. As with other controversies in modern medicine, federal officials and health authorities project a stale air of infallibility. To question them is framed as questioning "science itself." This hubris, which is echoed in Anthony Fauci's infamous declaration that "attacks on me are attacks on science", captures the deeper ethos that has shielded fluoridation from proper scrutiny. The result is that the nation's fluoridation policy endures not because the evidence is conclusive but because institutional power resists any acknowledgement of error.
This is not new. More than 50 years ago, two courageous scientists -Dr. John Yiamouyiannis and Dr. Dean Burke, a co-founder of the National Cancer Institute, were among the first to publicly challenge fluoride's safety. They published dozens of papers an
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