In response to emails from Durango-area residents concerned about water fluoridation in the city’s water, the city of Durango invited the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to establish the facts.
Fluoride, a natural mineral used in toothpaste, has also been used in public drinking water for at least 79 years. Now, it’s fallen under fresh scrutiny by a California district court, politicians and activist groups across the country.
Residents who attended a City Council meeting on Nov. 5 cited a Northern District of California judge’s ruling in September that the optimal level of fluoride in public drinking water “poses an unreasonable risk of reduced IQ in children.” The judge ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to create a regulatory response, although the required response was not defined.
City Attorney Mark Morgan said the single district court ruling will almost certainly go through an extensive appeals process.
According to the CDPHE, fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral found in nearly all water sources that is added to drinking water to protect teeth. It’s comparable to other healthy nutrients such as calcium in milk to protect bones, folate added to orange juice to prevent birth defects and iodine added to salt to protect thyroids.
Fluoride has been studied meticulously since 1945, and water fluoridation’s purpose is to prevent tooth decay. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention credits the ingenuity as one of the 10 greatest public health interventions of the 20th century because of the decline in cavities since its implementation.
But residents who spoke at the City Council meeting Nov. 5 were concerned that water fluoridation poses a significant risk to public health.
Those who spoke during a public comment period didn’t explicitly ask City Council to take action, but city spokesman Tom Sluis said emails from residents made it clear concerned residents want the city to cease putting fluoride in its water.
Resident James Forleo said the California district court’s ruling is “historic.”
He noted the ruling doesn’t specify how the EPA must respond, but said the judge’s order makes clear the federal agency cannot ignore it and is obligated to respond.
“We are affecting children’s brains and we can’t ignore that,” he said.
Other residents pointed to skull-and-crossbones markings on fluoride bags or containers stored at Durango’s water treatment plant as evidence fluoride is a dangerous substance.
“Last time I inspected the palette of sodium fluoride bags up at the water treatment plant, the city of Durango was using a toxic sodium fluoride that is sourced from China,” resident Adam Howell said. “On the front of the bags of this powdery drug is the image of a skull and crossbones with the word ‘Toxic’ written underneath it.”
He said local, state and federal governments are in cahoots with “special interests” to force water fluoridation upon the public as a medical treatment, and the conspiracy must come to an end.
He added powdered sodium fluoride is available for purchase on the internet if people want to treat their own drinking water.
La Plata County resident Katrina Blair said she acknowledges fluoride is an ingredient in household toothpastes, but she is worried fluoride used in water fluoridation is an industry byproduct of pesticides, aluminum and fertilizer and that it contains arsenic and lead.
She said fluoride may or may not protect teeth, but there is a lot of research on “both sides” and propaganda that people have to weed through.
“It’s pretty easy to make sure our kids are getting a good source of it,” she said, referencing toothpaste. “But to put it in everyone’s water and to medicate everyone, that doesn’t feel correct.”
The concerns mounted at City Council just days after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine activist and president-elect Donald Trump’s apparent pick for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said Trump would look to remove fluoride from public drinking water on his first day in office, The Associated Press reported.
“On Jan. 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” Kennedy said.
In an interview with NPR, Kennedy said fluoride made sense in the 1940s, but now it’s in toothpaste and unneeded in drinking water, adding that water is “a very bad way to deliver it because it’s delivered through the blood system.”
Not everyone who spoke at the meeting was against fluoride.
Angela Pinkerton, a Durango pediatric dentist and regional authority on childhood cavities, said Durango is without question more protected than surrounding non-fluoridated counties.
She said her most significant patients who require a high order of care in a hospital setting are typically under 4 years old.
“They have more than half of their teeth decayed or have to be extracted from decay, and approximately 75% of that population is residing in a non-fluoridated area,” she said.
She said the study about water fluoridation and lower IQ referenced by the California district court does not apply to the city of Durango. Fluoride levels above 1.5 mg, double the levels used in Durango water, are toxic, but the city monitors water fluoridation to prevent overexposure.
“The results of this study are weak and they provide little insight into the correlation with the fluoride and the IQ, admittedly, because the studies compared were dissimilar to small sample sizes and were not biologically plausible,” she said.
She also said Durango School District 9-R students are meeting and exceeding state academic performance standards.
“That supports that we are not experiencing a global cognitive deficit related to our community fluoridation exposure,” she said.
Durango High School students graduated at a rate of 95% in the 2023-24 school year. Superintendent Karen Cheser said the district’s Colorado Measures of Academic Success scores continue to rank in the top 20% in the state.
CDPHE State Dental Director Dr. Maryam Mahmood attended the meeting to address the California court ruling and misinformation about fluoride. She was joined by Courtney Justice, La Plata County Public Health Department regional oral health specialist and a registered dental hygienist, who spoke to the benefits of water fluoridation.
“Water fluoridation is a public health intervention that’s been studied thousands of times in peer-reviewed journals,” Mahmood said. “At optimal levels, it presents no measurable risk to human health, cognition or child development.”
She said the District Court of Northern California’s ruling is at odds with well established scientific evidence, and the National Toxicology Program report cited in the court ruling itself explicitly says there is not enough evidence to determine if optimal water fluoridation levels – 0.7 mg per liter, equivalent to one drop in 16 gallons of water – has a negative effect on children’s IQ.
The NTP report itself says its finding should not be applied to public policy regarding fluoride in drinking water, a point the California district judge apparently ignored.
Justice said she facilitates a school-based oral health program across La Plata, Archuleta, Dolores, Montezuma and San Juan counties. In 2023, she saw 610 students across the school year.
She developed a study to analyze oral health data of students to understand how prominent dental disease is among them. In La Plata County, data shows the further away a school is from a central water system using water fluoridation, the more cavities there are among students at the school.
A data map for La Plata County shows 50% of students seen by Justice at Sunnyside Elementary School, located just north of County Road 218 about 11 miles south of Durango, had active dental disease, whereas only 23% of students seen by Justice at Park Elementary School at 510 East Sixth Ave. in Durango had dental disease.
Tuesday was not the first time residents have rallied against fluoride in Durango’s public drinking water. In April 2017, the issue was put to voters, who roundly decided to continue water fluoridation.
The Durango Herald reported then that 3,094 voters supported keeping the system in place, while 1,735 voters supported an ordinance that would require the city to stop fluoridating its water.
Those opposing fluoride raised about $4,500 for their campaign, while fluoride supporters raised nearly $22,500, largely from Denver-based nonprofit Healthier Colorado, which the former group attributed to big money interests.
cburney@durangoherald.com
