by Anna Clark

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Just 15 months after receiving an award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for excellence in community water fluoridation, the city of Grayling, Michigan, changed course.

With little notice or fanfare, council members voted unanimously in May to end Grayling’s decadeslong treatment program. The city shut down the equipment used to deliver the drinking water additive less than two weeks later.

Although it already paid for them, the town returned six unopened barrels of the fluoride treatment to the supplier.

Personal choice was the issue, said City Manager Erich Podjaske. “Why are we forcing something on residents and business owners, some of which don’t want fluoride in their water?” he said. He saw arguments for and against treatment in his research, he said, and figured that those who want fluoride can still get it at the dentist or in their toothpaste.

Drinking water fluoridation is widely heralded as a public health triumph, but it’s had critics since it was pioneered 80 years ago in Grand Rapids, about 150 miles southwest of Grayling. While once largely on the fringes, fluoridation skeptics now hold sway in federal, state and local government, and their arguments have seeped into the mainstream.

Even in the state where the treatment began, communities are backpedaling. And because customer notice requirements are patchy, people may not even know about it when their fluoridation stops.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has called fluoride “industrial waste” and supports an end to community water fluoridation. The head of the Food and Drug Administration said on a newscast that the CDC’s online description of water fluoridation as one of the greatest public health achievements is “misinformation.”

The CDC, which is in the midst of a leadership exodus and staff revolt, and the Environmental Protection Agency are reviewing their respective approaches to fluoride in drinking water. At the same time, President Donald Trump’s administration dismantled the CDC’s Division of Oral Health, which, among other initiatives, provided research and technical assistance on fluoridation. That’s the office that helped present awards for well-run programs like the one in Grayling.

Since Kennedy was elevated to the nation’s top health post, Utah and Florida became the first states to ban communities from adding fluoride to public drinking water. The Utah ban included measures to make prescription fluoride supplements more accessible — but now, the FDA is moving to remove certain types of those supplements for children from the market.

Altogether, legislation was introduced this year in at least 21 states to prohibit or roll back provisions related to adding fluoride to public water systems, according to Abby Francl, policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures. In addition, citing Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, Oklahoma’s governor issued an executive order instructing state agencies to cease promotion of fluoridation in the public water supply while it reviews the practice.

Some local communities across the country opted to stop treatment this year, including at least four in Alabama, the state with the second-lowest number of dentists per resident. Others are debating it. On Michigan’s east side, the medical director of St. Clair County’s health department urged the agency to take steps to “prohibit the addition of fluoride” to public water systems. Two Upper Peninsula cities with a shared water system had special council meetings this summer on fluoridation. In Hillsdale, the acting mayor has said that ending fluoridation is a top priority.

“I want to reform the water system now that we have RFK in Health and Human Services,” Joshua Paladino told a local paper in November. Paladino added in an email to ProPublica that he........

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