(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Utah became the first state to ban fluoride in public drinking water after the state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, signed legislation Thursday that bars cities and communities from deciding whether to add the mineral to their water systems.

Utah lawmakers who pushed for a ban said putting fluoride in water was too expensive. Cox, who grew up and raised his own children in a community without fluoridated water, compared it recently to being “medicated” by the government.

The ban, which is effective May 7, comes weeks after U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has expressed skepticism about water fluoridation, was sworn into office.

In January, the National Institutes of Health published a study that supports Kennedy’s position on the matter—finding “significant inverse associations between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ scores.”

According to the study, children’s IQ’s decreased by about 1.63 points for every per 1-mg/L increase in urinary fluoride. The studies underpinning the NIEH’s findings were conducted outside the U.S.

“There is concern that pregnant women and children are getting fluoride from many sources, and that their total fluoride exposure is too high and may affect fetal, infant and child neurodevelopment,” NIEHS epidemiologist Kyla Taylor, the report’s lead author, told the New York Times.

The NIEHS study follows a September order from a federal judge for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to further regulate fluoride in drinking water because high levels could pose a risk to the intellectual development of children.

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen cautioned that it’s not certain that the amount of fluoride typically added to water is causing lower IQ in kids, but he concluded that mounting research points to an unreasonable risk that it could be. He ordered the EPA to take steps to lower that risk, but didn’t say what those measures should be.

Despite those recent developments, Utah appears to be alone in terms of states pushing to get fluoride out of their water. Proposed restrictions on fluoridation in New Hampshire, Tennessee and North Dakota have been rejected. A measure in Kentucky to make fluoridation optional stalled in the state Senate.

More than 200 million people in the U.S., or almost two-thirds of the population, receive fluoridated water through community water.

The sponsor of the Utah legislation, Republican Rep. Stephanie Gricius, acknowledged fluoride has benefits, but said it was an issue of “individual choice” to not have it in the water.

Out of the 484 Utah water systems that reported data in 2024, only 66 fluoridated their water, an Associated Press analysis showed. The largest was the state’s biggest city, Salt Lake City.

Utah in 2022 ranked 44th in the nation for the percentage of residents that receive fluoridated water, according to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.