Despite Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attestations against the use of fluoride, his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda is apparently going easy on one of the root causes of fluorosis (the only known side effect of over-fluoridated water): pesticides.
Under Donald Trump’s helm, the Health Department secretary has sworn to remove fluoride from all public water systems. Last month, Kennedy said he was assembling a task force on the issue, with plans to tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to end its fluoridation program for good.
But a forthcoming report from Kennedy, expected to be released Thursday, will apparently not label two popular pesticides used by U.S. farmers as “unsafe,” reported The Wall Street Journal. They include atrazine, a herbicide used on grasses and corn, and glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup.
Bayer and Monsanto (which transferred ownership of Roundup to Bayer in 2018) have jointly paid nearly $11 billion to settle multiple lawsuits and class actions related to accusations that Roundup’s use is behind a host of cancer cases, including lymphoma and leukemia. Approximately 165,000 Roundup lawsuits had been filed against the companies as of January 2024, according to the law firm Simmons Hanly Conroy, which represented some of the victims.
Well water, fed by groundwater, is one of the most common sources of over-fluoridated water. But why that water is exposed to high concentrations of the naturally occurring mineral is largely related to local industries and agrobusiness operations “that increase the risk of heavy metals, pesticides, nitrates, radon and fluoride in the water,” according to a 2023 study that extracted data from 15 fluoride-related studies conducted around the world.
Fluoride was first introduced to U.S. water in 1945 as part of a public health decision to reduce cavities and tooth decay in adults and children. It was remarkably successful, lowering the cavity and decay rate in both groups by as much as 25 percent, according to the American Dental Association. In 1999, the CDC listed water fluoridation as one of the 10 greatest public health achievements in the twentieth century, for that reason.
Furthermore, fluoride levels in public water are lower than they’ve been in decades. In 2015, the Obama administration dropped the maximum level of fluoride per liter of water to 0.7 milligrams from the previous guidance issued in 1962, which allowed levels to range between 0.7 and 1.2 milligrams per liter, in an effort to further waylay instances of dental fluorosis (discoloration and poor mineralization of the tooth).
“The benefits of fluoride for oral health considerably outweigh the risks,” Rodrigo Lacruz, a professor at New York University’s College of Dentistry, said in 2020, after he published a study on the effects of high fluoride ingestion.
Kennedy’s report will reportedly promise to question pesticide use. But falling short of actually enacting policy around it, all while duplicating and repeating research already conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency, is making ag industry experts further question whether the Trump administration is actually focused on efficiency, as they claim.
“If the administration’s goal is to bring more efficiency to government, then why is the MAHA Commission duplicating efforts by raising questions about pesticides that have been answered repeatedly through research and reviews by the Environmental Protection Agency?” Illinois farmer and National Corn Growers Association President Kenneth Hartman Jr. told the Journal.
Kennedy’s report will reportedly take actual aim at childhood vaccines (a popular topic for Kennedy) and ultraprocessed foods.
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