This article was originally published by Ethan Huff at Natural News. 

The United States government has once again found that consuming fluoride is really dangerous, especially for children.

A new report from the National Toxicology Program (NTP), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), reveals that exposure to fluoridated water at levels twice the recommended limit of 0.7 milligrams per liter (mg/l) of water is linked to lower IQ. Keep in mind that prior to 2015, the government-recommended fluoride level for drinking water was 1.5 mg/l.

For many decades – and still in some U.S. cities today that have not adjusted their fluoride levels to the new 0.7 mg/l standard – children across the U.S. have been forced to consume and bathe in water that was fluoridated at levels of 1.5 mg/l, which the NTP now admits causes brain damage and lowers IQ in children.

The new study, which includes data and analyses from previously published research, marks the first time that a U.S. federal agency has determined “with moderate confidence” that fluoride damages children’s brains.

“While the report was not designed to evaluate the health effects of fluoride in drinking water alone, it is a striking acknowledgment of a potential neurological risk from high levels of fluoride,” The Associated Press (AP) reported.

(Related: Harvard University researchers identified a link between fluoride and ADHD and mental disorders some 10 years ago, but fluoridated water keeps on flowing through taps across the U.S.)

Drinking, bathing in any amount of fluoride isn’t safe

The CDC still claims that fluoride consumption at lower levels is safe, helping to re-mineralize teeth and prevent dental caries (cavities). How is a person supposed to regulate this, though, when people are exposed to fluoridated water at unknown levels each and every day?

If a person lives in a fluoridated area and consumes food and beverages made with fluoridated water, not to mention brushing one’s teeth with fluoridated toothpaste, the amount of fluoride that ends up being ingested has the potential to be very high.

Even if fluoride does the things that public health officials continue to claim it does for the benefit of health, the drug needs to be regulated and controlled at specific levels in actual drug products, not laced into the water supply.

“I think this (report) is crucial in our understanding,” commented Ashley Malin, a researcher at the University of Florida who has been studying the effects of fluoride on pregnant women and their unborn children, calling the study the most rigorous of its kind.

For their study, researchers at the NTP reviewed a cohort of studies from Canada, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, and Mexico looking at fluoridated drinking water. Based on the results of all these studies, the NTP determined that consuming fluoridated water at levels greater than 1.5 mg/l results in lost IQ points.

While the review itself did not determine exactly how many IQ points are lost due to drinking fluoridated water, several of the studies included as part of the review suggested that children not exposed to fluoridated drinking water have an IQ that is anywhere between two and five points higher than their fluoridated counterparts.

The World Health Organization (WHO), by the way, still recommends that water supplies be fluoridated at a level of 1.5 mg/l, which is more than double the new recommendation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as of 2015 that only 0.7 mg/l of fluoride be added to water supplies.

Currently, about 0.6 percent of the total U.S. population, around 1.9 million people, are still exposed to drinking water fluoridated at levels of 1.5 mg/l or higher.

“The findings from this report raise the questions about how these people can be protected and what makes the most sense,” Malin added.