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Trump Expresses Tentative Support for RFK Jr.’s Plan to Remove Fluoride From Water Supply
Former President Trump expressed tentative support for former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to remove fluoride from water.
“Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump told NBC News on Sunday. “You know, it’s possible.”
Kennedy, who ran for president but suspended his bid in August and endorsed Trump, has spread unfounded health-related conspiracies. He posted Saturday on the social platform X that if Trump wins the election, the first day in office his administration would “advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.”
“Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease,” Kennedy’s post said.
Lead Poisoning Costs World’s Children 765 Million IQ Points a Year: Study
Low-level lead poisoning remains pervasive in the U.S. and world populations despite decades of efforts to end the use of lead in infrastructure, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
The results, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that exposure to lead, even at levels once considered safe, is a factor in 5.5 million deaths from cardiovascular disease a year. In children, for whom lead exposure is a major contributor to problems with cognitive development, researchers found it continues to cost the collective equivalent of 765 million IQ points a year.
In addition to developmental and cardiovascular problems, low-level lead poisoning is associated with hypertension and chronic kidney failure in adults. “The global burden of disease from lead exposure is staggering,” Ana Navas-Acien, chair of environmental health sciences at the Mailman School, said in a statement. “In contrast to the decline in the rate of coronary heart disease in industrialized countries, the rate has increased over the past 30 years in industrializing countries. One in three children worldwide — more than 600 million children — have lead poisoning.”
Toxic Air and a Maternal Mortality Crisis in America’s Steel Town
Kimmie Gordon sat in her car, watching the sky darken as she waited for her 15-year-old son, Kaleb, to finish football practice. It is one of five sports her teenager plays despite living with chronic asthma. Over an hour stretched on, but Gordon barely noticed. After a long day of juggling the responsibilities of being a single mom and an environmental activist, her thoughts circled back to a question that had haunted her for years: What did it cost for her son to be born in Gary, Indiana?
“I’m the Black mother of a child who’s born into a health disparity with no other option and no other reason than because his mom, who he didn’t choose, incubated him in the city of Gary,” Gordon said. “I mean, that’s what it boiled down to, and so now he has to live out the rest of his life being asthmatic.”
Gordon’s voice faltered as she recounted her pregnancy, much of it spent cleaning out her late mother’s house on Burr Street, just a stone’s throw from a decades-old industrial dump, noisy railroad tracks carrying coal-filled cargo cars and two neighboring steel mills.
“I didn’t think about it while I was pregnant, but I wonder now if that played into it. The toxic dust, the trucks, the trains — it’s been part of my life since childhood. And now I think, what are we really doing to protect the women and babies here, already breathing 150 years of contamination in our Gary air?”
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Study Ties PM2.5 From Agriculture to Memory Issues in Children
A new University of Southern California (USC) study involving 8,500 children from across the country reveals that a form of air pollution, largely the product of agricultural emissions, is linked to poor learning and memory performance in nine and 10-year-olds.
The specific component of fine particle air pollution, or PM2.5, ammonium nitrate, is also implicated in Alzheimer’s and dementia risk in adults, suggesting that PM2.5 may cause neurocognitive harm across the lifespan. Ammonium nitrate forms when ammonia gas and nitric acid, produced by agricultural activities and fossil fuel combustion, respectively, react in the atmosphere. The findings appear in Environmental Health Perspectives.
“Our study highlights the need for more detailed research on particulate matter sources and chemical components,” said senior author Megan Herting, an associate professor of population and public health sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
For the last several years, Herting has been working with data from the largest brain study across America, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, or ABCD, to understand how PM2.5 may affect the brain.
PM2.5, a key indicator of air quality, is a mixture of dust, soot, organic compounds and metals that come in a range of particle sizes less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter. PM2.5 can travel deep into the lungs, where these particles can pass into the bloodstream, and bypass the blood-brain barrier, causing serious health problems.
Dozens of ‘High Hazard’ Toxins Are Common in Beauty Products — Report
About one-third of about 318,000 ingredients identified in beauty and personal care items do not have public toxicological profiles, while about 45 chemicals thought to be “high hazard” are commonly added, a new comprehensive analysis of the industry’s products finds.
Among the common toxic substances used in the 8,500 products checked by ChemForward, a non-profit that promotes transparency around beauty ingredients, are chemicals linked to hormone disruption, cancer, lung irritation and other health issues.
The report will be used as the foundation for a new industry effort to fill information gaps around the chemicals it uses, remove dangerous substances from supply chains, and advocate for shifts to safer alternatives.
The high number of unknown toxicological profiles highlights the challenges in avoiding dangerous chemicals in cosmetics and personal products, but there is optimism that it can be done, in part because the number of individual chemicals essential to the products is far below 318,000.
Parents Trust AI for Medical Advice More Than Doctors, Researchers Find
Artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining more of parents’ trust than actual doctors.
That’s according to a new study from the University of Kansas Life Span Institute, which found that parents seeking information on their children’s health are turning to AI more than human health care professionals. The research, published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, also revealed that parents rate AI-generated text as “credible, moral and trustworthy.”
More than 100 parents ranging from 18 to 65 years old were asked to rate text generated by either a human doctor or ChatGPT (the AI chatbot made by OpenAI) under the supervision of an expert. The study concluded that ChatGPT is “capable of impacting behavioral intentions for medication, sleep and diet decision-making.”
French Families Sue TikTok Over Alleged Promotion of Self-Harm Content
Seven French families are hoping to set a precedent by holding TikTok liable for insufficient content moderation they say put their children at risk.
The families, part of a collective called Algos Victima, are suing the social media platform whose parent company ByteDance is based in Beijing. They accuse it of promoting content tied to self-mutilation, suicide or eating disorders.
“Our challenge is to see TikTok held accountable for its lack of moderation, which makes the service flawed,” said Laure Boutron-Marmion, the lawyer for the collective, confirming the civil lawsuit first reported by Franceinfo.
The collective includes the families of seven teenage girls, two of whom died by suicide. In September 2023, the family of 15-year-old Marie filed criminal charges against TikTok after her death, accusing the platform of “inciting suicide,” “failure to assist a person in danger,” and “promoting and advertising methods for self-harm.”
