Before tackling fluoride issue, officials should help prevent spread of dangerous virus

The Camas City Council is set to reconsider the City’s nearly 60-year-old practice of fluoridating its public water supply. Last week, a group of concerned community members — some from Camas but most from outside the CIty — implored Camas officials to halt the fluoridation practice that has been touted by medical professionals for decades as a cost-effective way to prevent tooth cavities. 

The speakers had some valid points. Although dentistry groups, as well as the U.S. Surgeon General and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have long recommended fluoridating water systems as a preventative measure that costs far less than having to repair dental cavities, there have always been concerns about the possible negative health and environmental impacts of adding fluoride —  an inorganic ion of fluorine, a naturally occurring mineral found in the Earth’s crust — to our public water supplies. 

In 2016, concerned that some pregnant women and children may be ingesting more fluoride than they need to keep teeth from developing cavities, the National Toxicology Program began a systemic review of peer-reviewed scientific literature about the “association between fluoride exposure and neurodevelopment and cognition.”

Their findings concluded that “higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children.” The review also concluded, however, that there was “insufficient data to determine if the low fluoride level” — such as the 0.7 milligrams per liter currently used in Camas and most other municipalities in the United States that fluoridate their water systems — “has a negative effect on children’s IQ” and “found no evidence that fluoride exposure had adverse effects on adult cognition.”

City leaders should be willing to have an open debate about the process of fluoridating drinking water, but it is hard to understand why community members, as well as public officials, can be so concerned by fluoride, which has not been definitely proven to be harmful to children’s health in the small doses available in drinking water, when they have been so silent about preventing the spread of a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus known as COVID — one of the greatest public health threats of the past century. 

The Camas City Council may decide to halt its fluoridation program given serious questions about the substance’s possible health impacts, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that community members and local officials who rail against fluoride or even “forever chemicals” found in our water, air and everyday household products are doing so because they want to help keep children safe when there is zero discussion about the ongoing COVID pandemic — which is still killing hundreds of Americans each week and has caused possibly life-long “long COVID” issues for between 17 million and 43 million Americans — or even about the health benefits of cleaning our indoor air, about wearing quality respirator masks to prevent catching COVID over and over or about the devastating health impacts of “long COVID.” 

Despite a widespread campaign to shove COVID under the rug, we are still in a worldwide pandemic and people — including children — are still being killed and disabled by SARS-CoV-2 every single day. 

Here is what the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) had to say about COVID this week: “In the past five years, more than 7 million deaths from COVID-19 have been reported to WHO, but we estimate the true death toll to be at least three times higher. We cannot talk about COVID in the past tense. It’s still with us, it still causes acute disease and “long COVID”, and it still kills. On average this year, about 1,000 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported to WHO each week – and that’s just from the few countries that are still reporting. The world might want to forget about COVID-19, but we cannot afford to.”

Like many other viruses that can cause significant health risks after a mild acute phase — including HIV, which normally presents as a flu-like illness in its acute phase but can cause widespread damage to the body and destroy the immune system years later, and polio, which can cause paralysis weeks after the initial infection and can lead to painful nervous system, post-polio syndrome, symptoms decades after the acute phase — we now know that even mild and asymptomatic COVID infections can lead to widespread damage throughout our bodies. 

Scientific studies conducted over the past five years have proven that even mild COVID infections — not COVID vaccines, as some online conspiracies have insisted without any proof to back their claims — have led to heart attacks, strokes, brain damage, chronic fatigue, nerve damage and other life-threatening conditions months and years after the initial COVID infection.
As the American Heart Association reported in October 2024: “People infected with the COVID-19 virus in 2020 may have double the risk for future heart attacks, strokes or premature death from any cause up to three years later – even if they never showed signs of severe illness.”

If we are concerned about fluoride’s impacts on our children’s health, we should be terrified by what COVID can do to kids’ bodies. 

“Pediatric long COVID is more common than many thought, and we keep letting kids be reinfected with new variants,” Scientific American reported just three months ago, adding that, “since the COVID pandemic began, claims that the disease poses only minimal risk to children have spread widely, on the presumption that the lower rate of severe acute illness in kids tells the whole story. Notions that children are nearly immune to COVID and don’t need to be vaccinated have pervaded. These ideas are wrong. People making such claims ignore the accumulating risk of long COVID, the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection, in children who may get infected once or twice a year. The condition may already have affected nearly six million kids in the U.S. Children need us to wake up to this serious threat.”

We are now entering the fifth year of living with COVID. Testing is rare. Repeat infections are common. Vaccines have proven effective at lowering our risk of severe acute infections, but do not prevent us from developing long COVID complications. Masking is nearly unheard of — despite studies showing respirator masks like N95s are highly effective at preventing the spread of the virus. And few people are pushing for simple preventative measures, such as clearing our indoor air with HEPA filtration systems and far-UVC lights. 

Before they get mired in other, much less concerning, health risks such as trace amounts of fluoride in our water systems, public officials must begin to reevaluate how they think about COVID and its continued public health impacts — pushing for more indoor air-purification systems; advocating for and helping to fund public testing centers; modeling good behavior by wearing respirator masks during crowded indoor meetings or public gatherings; and reminding community members that, despite vaccines that have helped make the acute phase much less deadly, COVID is, as the WHO’s director-general pointed out this week, still sickening, disabling and killing people every single day.