With established health care mired in misinformation, what’s next?

By DENNIS GRUBAUGH 

Forty-plus years ago, Godfrey resident Ruby Hale garnered a lot of attention by calling on Illinois communities to take fluoride out of their drinking water.

Fluoride, she said, was a suspected cause of low IQs in children and other health risks. Dentists, though, were mostly united behind fluoridation because it was shown to help prevent tooth decay.

I interviewed Hale extensively. She was an average housewife, taking a stand held by a small minority, and she was well-versed in her subject. She spent a lot of time making her case to the media and speaking in public meetings. As the founder of the Illinois Pure Water Committee, she was not to be dissuaded.

Most people dismissed her concerns outright. After all, she stood against the majority of doctors and national studies that concluded the health benefits of fluoride vastly outweighed the risks.

Opposition to fluoridation dimmed with time, and water supply treatment remained unchanged for decades.

Until now.

I thought about Ruby Hale recently when news surfaced about fluoridation being outlawed in the states of Utah and Florida, marking dramatic shifts in public thinking.

Utah passed House Bill 81, the Fluoride Amendments, prohibiting the addition of fluoride to public drinking water in the state starting May 7, 2025. This makes Utah the first U.S. state to ban community water fluoridation. The law offers a middle ground by allowing pharmacists to prescribe fluoride supplements without a prescription from a dental or medical provider.

The ban for Florida, effective July 1, 2025, was enacted through legislation signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. The bill does not explicitly mention fluoride, but it prevents the use of “certain additives in a water system,” effectively banning fluoridation.

Similar measures are pending in 16 other states.

Today, I’m left wondering if Hale wasn’t on to something all those years ago. The answer, like so many things involving established health care, is not straightforward. For one thing, people on either side of the issue agree that more research should be done, even though we’ve studied water-supply safety since at least 1945.

Is there anything wrong with more study? Not if you do it slowly, methodically, and with continued emphasis on medical science.

Science, though, is increasingly falling to misinformation. Largely driven by social media, people are expressing doubts over a range of health topics with long-accepted solutions.

Look at the current debates over measles. Twenty-five years after it was declared dead in the United States, the disease is spreading anew because some parents refuse to accept the value and efficiency of measles vaccines that were created 60 years ago.

These debates always seem to have some smidgeon of facts on both sides, but they also have way too many uninformed opinions.

Sadly, and increasingly, a lot of otherwise smart people are jumping off the Bridge of Truth and into Conspiracy Lake. We don’t know who to trust.

Into the waters have been added figures placed in charge of federal departments who question everything we thought to be credible. Robert F. Kennedy, for instance, with preconceived notions about autism and vaccinations, now running amok as secretary of U.S. Health and Human Services, firing experts with years of institutional knowledge.

Worse yet, we are slashing the budgets of important health institutions. Rural hospitals face cutbacks, even closure, because of proposed changes to Medicaid. The National Institutes of Health may lose funding valuable research programs. Thousands of jobs — and half the divisions ­— appear on the way out at Health and Human Services.

Science-based institutions are being hollowed out by this administration in badly managed cost-saving actions. That will lead to a loss of scientists to other countries.

America’s autocratic leadership is divesting itself of the opportunity to lead when it comes to science, and many other areas.

We’re left depending more on our personal doctors and the judgment of leaders in other countries, who are dedicated to building research, alliances, public safety and human health. True leaders respect the centuries of science that have come before. They don’t scoff at it.

In some ways, these health debates are much like America’s growing quarrels over other established conventions — the legitimacy of elections, veracity of institutions, supremacy of the courts, value of education, etc.

Our generation is losing sight of what’s real and important. COVID seems to have dulled our minds. Smartphones have distracted our thoughtfulness. Blame what you want. Our American leadership is thinking so far outside the box that the box itself is in question.

What would U.S. history’s wisest heads of state — from Lincoln to Roosevelt — say about slashing health care budgets and the likely brain drain coming our way?

They would say, “Put on your thinking caps! We are not going to cure any ills by sidelining science.”

Dennis Grubaugh is the retired editor of the Illinois Business Journal.