Interview Hofman-Caris, C.H.M. - Donald Trump could push the US to stop adding fluoride to water. Where does Europe stand?

“Few EU countries still fluoridate their water supplies, but there’s no evidence that countries in Europe stopped because of health harms.
As US President-elect Donald Trump charts his second term in the White House, an unusual suspect is at the top of the health policy to-do list: removing fluoride, a naturally occurring mineral that helps prevent tooth decay, from the water supply.
Are European countries still debating fluoride?
Not really – and especially not the Dutch, according to Roberta Hofman, a senior scientist at the KWR Water Research Institute in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands began adding fluoride to some drinking water as an experiment in 1953, eventually reaching about 2.5 million people by the late 1960s.
However, in 1973, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that there was no legal basis for fluoridation and that policymakers would have to pass a new law to add fluoride – without ruling on whether it is good or bad for people’s health.
The debate hasn’t been meaningfully revived since then, Hofman told Euronews Health. “People started to say, ‘Well, the government should not give us some medicine [when] we cannot choose where to buy our drinking water from,” she said. “In the Netherlands, we don’t want to add chemicals or anything to drinking water”.”

(Citations: Galvin, G. – Interview HofmanCaris, C.H.M. – Donald Trump could push the US to stop adding fluoride to water. Where does Europe stand? – www.euronews.com (2024)23 November)