I am sure you are aware of this. If you have any first-hand or expert knowledge of an event or fact, if you see it covered in the news, it is almost always wrong, sometimes grievously so. But even though you know the journalist got this wrong, you are generally prepared to trust them on subjects about which you know nothing.
I just had that event. There was news coverage a few years ago about how fluoridation lowers IQ. 8/23/24 NPR: "A newly released report from the National Institutes of Health says fluoride in drinking water at twice the recommended limit is associated with lower IQ in children."
Study Links High Fluoride Exposure to Lower I.Q. in Children
The results of a new federal analysis were drawn from studies conducted in other countries, where drinking water contains more fluoride than in the United States.
If you do not get past the first few clickbait lines, you will miss that these studies involved much higher fluoride levels than are used in U.S. drinking water, in places like Iran, India, and China, where water is sometimes naturally very high in fluoride. This study from JAMA Pediatrics is a meta-analysis of existing work. Read the data and you will see that this is a problem only at pretty high levels:
In 31 studies reporting fluoride measured in drinking water, a dose-response association was found between exposed and reference groups (SMD, -0.15; 95% CI, -0.20 to -0.11; P < .001), and associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L and less than 2 mg/L; however, the association was null at less than 1.5 mg/L.
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