https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/world/canada/canada-calgary-fluoride-water.html
~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
Canada|The Anatomy of a Canadian City’s Fight Over Fluoride
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/world/canada/canada-calgary-fluoride-water.html
A Canadian city faced a financial headache 14 years ago: The plants that treated its water with fluoride needed major upgrades. But Calgary, Alberta’s largest city, was both reluctant to spend the money and underwhelmed by fluoride’s advertised health benefits.
So it decided to remove the mineral from the water. The backlash did not take long.
Activists lobbied City Hall to bring back fluoride. Researchers argued that its absence had led to increased dental problems among children. Residents demanded more say. Those efforts culminated in a ballot referendum in 2021, and Calgary voted to restart fluoridation.
Four years and some construction delays later, fluoride returned to the city’s water in June.
The backlash did not take long — this time from the other side.
Opponents have taken to social media, to City Hall and to the courts — without success — challenging Calgary’s move, citing research by Canadian scientists showing potential health risks posed by fluoride.
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Critics have also been buoyed by the campaign in the United States by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, to end fluoridation. He has claimed that fluoridation can lead to arthritis, bone cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders. So far, two states, Utah and Florida, have banned the introduction of fluoride into drinking water.
The fight over fluoride in Calgary reflects a broader battle over the role of governments and public health agencies in efforts to protect people’s well-being, and the rights of individuals to decide what is best for themselves and their families.
“We’ve done fine without fluoride,” said Lindsay Warrick, a mother in Calgary of two girls, one 6, the other 3. “Don’t force it on us all when there are questions raised about potential harm.”
Suspicions about the safety of fluoridation have swirled since 1945, when Grand Rapids, Mich., became the first city in the world to implement the process. During the Cold War some propagandists claimed that fluoride was a government mind control tool. Conspiracy theories about fluoride have stoked people’s fears for decades.
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Lindsay Warrick said she was concerned about the potential neurological impacts of fluoride on children.
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Ms. Warrick started seeking information about fluoride as she navigated her daughters’ neurodiversity diagnoses.
Scientists say fluoride in drinking water has helped to greatly reduce tooth decay and is widely regarded as one of the most important public health accomplishments of the 20th century.
Fluoridation is far more prevalent in the United States, where 72 percent of the population has access to fluoridated water, compared with Canada, where the figure is 39 percent, according to federal data in both countries.
Calgary’s debate over fluoride has drawn national attention in part because of how far back it goes — there have been seven referendums on the issue since 1957, four of them won by opponents of fluoride and three by supporters.
Sitting outside her bungalow-style home this summer on a quiet street with towering evergreen trees, Ms. Warrick said she had voted in favor of bringing back fluoride in 2021. But she has since changed her mind, she said, after learning about research claiming to show a link between fluoride and cognitive damage in children.
“That does worry me,” said Ms. Warrick, who started seeking information about fluoride as she navigated her daughters’ neurodiversity diagnoses. Her family uses a special filtration jug to try to minimize their fluoride intake, she said. “I would love more conclusive evidence to say that it is actually totally safe.”
Some opposed to the resumption of fluoridation in Calgary point to a 2019 paper by Canadian researchers published in the scientific journal JAMA Pediatrics, which said that children born to mothers who drank fluoridated water while pregnant had lower I.Q. scores.
“This is something that really deserves careful attention by policymakers,” said Christine Till, one of the study’s authors and a clinical neuropsychologist at York University in Toronto. “The biggest accomplishment is that we have sparked other scientists to look at this once taboo topic and legitimized the science on fluoride neurotoxicity.”
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But other academics have pushed back against the study, arguing that it overstated the correlation between fluoride and neurodevelopment and questioning the data analysis and interpretation, which found that the diminished I.Q. was present among boys but not girls.
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The Glenmore Dam in Calgary controls the Glenmore Reservoir, an important source of drinking water for the city.
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Juliet Guichon, a bioethicist and health law professor at the University of Calgary, has been an advocate for the benefits of fluoridation for oral health.
“What worries me is people who continue to perpetuate nonsense, which would inhibit other cities from benefiting from what is a 20th-century public health measure,” said Juliet Guichon, a bioethicist and health law professor at the University of Calgary, who for years has been an ardent champion of fluoridation and has taken on researchers challenging its safety.
She was among a group of experts who lodged a formal complaint about the Canadian study to JAMA Pediatrics and York University.
Some scientists said the study had needlessly deepened fears among the public.
But the study’s researchers have defended their work and wrote an opinion piece about the blowback.
A comprehensive analysis released this year by researchers in the United States of more than 70 other studies did find a significant relationship between lower I.Q. scores and exposure to high levels of fluoride, of 1.5 parts per million or greater.
That is far higher than the 0.7 parts per million recommended by public health agencies in Canada and the United States as a means to help prevent cavities.
Health professionals in Alberta say the lack of fluoride in Calgary for nearly a decade and a half had made children’s teeth worse.
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Anti-fluoridation protesters in Calgary.
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The Glenmore Water Treatment Plant in Calgary. Calgary has held seven referendums around the issue of adding fluoride to its water.
Dental infections that needed to be treated with intravenous antibiotics spiked significantly, according to Alberta Children’s Hospital. And one study found a link between fluoride-free water and increased pediatric dental procedures.
Mara Cordero, a cafe manager in Calgary, said her 5-year-old daughter had experienced severe tooth decay. Even though her baby teeth would eventually fall out, dental treatments — including veneers and metal caps that ultimately cost 6,000 Canadian dollars, or about $4,300 — were necessary to prevent complications in adulthood.
“Watching my daughter go under general anesthesia for extensive dental surgery was probably one of the more traumatic experiences of my life,” Ms. Cordero said. Fluoridated water, she said she concluded later, “could have prevented all of that.”
The cost of dental work is a chief reason that public health experts support fluoridation: It is far-reaching and can help low-income families maintain good oral health.
The heated emotions triggered in Calgary by the issue were on display over the summer at a courthouse in the city where anti-fluoride activists had filed an injunction to stop fluoridation. Protesters shouted and interrupted an interview that a journalist was holding with a medical professor who supported fluoridation. A few held signs that said, “Drugging us without our consent.”
Inside the packed courtroom, Robert Dickson, a retired family physician and a leader of the anti-fluoride movement in Calgary, sat in the front row, near Dr. Guichon, whom he called his “mortal enemy for the last 15 years.”
In the end, he said, Dr. Guichon and her allies won this round. The effort to pursue an injunction was abandoned because the opposition, he said, had limited financial resources to hire lawyers.
“We’ve obviously failed,” Dr. Dickson said.
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Robert Dickson, a retired family doctor, is a leader of the anti-fluoride movement in Calgary.
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