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Max’s Story: What Happens When Water Fluoridation Goes Wrong

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 19, 2025

When Utah lawmakers met during the legislative session to discuss and vote on whether to end the practice of fluoridating the state’s drinking water supply, 17-year-old Max Widmaier was there to offer key testimony.

In 2019, when Max was a fifth-grader, he was poisoned when a malfunctioning pump in Sandy, Utah, released undiluted hydrofluorosilicic acid into the water, affecting 1,500 households, institutions and businesses and sickening over 200 people.

An investigation revealed that fluoride was detected in the drinking water at 40 times the recommended levels, and officials failed to notify the public for 10 days.

Max unknowingly drank the over-fluoridated water in school. Soon after, he spiked a high fever, developed tics, had severe emotional swings, and experienced developmental regression so severe that at one point he lost the ability to compose sentences, his mother, Jenny Widmaier, told The Defender.

“I don’t remember fifth grade,” Max told Utah lawmakers. “That year is just a gaping hole where memory should be … because I drank the fluoridated water that day when Sandy City broke its line to public water.”

Jenny said that day, the school called her to pick Max up because he had a fever. She didn’t know if it was a virus, an infection, food poisoning or something else, so she asked Max about what he had been up to. Max mentioned that he drank water at school and it tasted metallic. At the time, Jenny didn’t give it a second thought.

After some severe gastrointestinal distress and about four days sick in bed, Max seemed fine, she said. The following Saturday, he hung out at a friend’s house, ate some tacos, and things seemed normal.

That night, Jenny’s husband, who came home late, checked in on Max before heading to bed. He immediately went to Jenny and asked, “What’s wrong with Max’s face?”

Jenny was surprised by the question. They went downstairs to examine Max together. “I was just watching him,” Jenny said, “and about every 30 to 45 seconds, his whole face would seize up and his head would drop, his chin would drop to his chest, and then he’d lift up and he was fine. He didn’t even notice it was happening.”

She asked Max what was going on with his face, but strangely, he had no idea what she was talking about. “It seemed he was blacking out,” Jenny said.

She called the emergency line for her pediatrician. They told her that if it happened while he was asleep, it could be serious, but that otherwise it was probably just a tic.

The “tic” seemed slightly better the following day, but Jenny took Max to the hospital to be evaluated. While they were there, the provider asked if they lived in Sandy City — which they didn’t.

When Jenny asked why it mattered if they lived in Sandy, the provider said there had been a fluoride leak there.

“Then it sort of clicked into place — the metallic tasting water, and his school is in Sandy,” Jenny said. The provider checked the map and saw that Max’s school was located in the fluoride leak zone. He told Jenny to get Max tested for heavy metals.

Water fluoridation comes with heavy metals

Jenny performed a home test on Max and it was positive for several metals, including chromium and lead. She kept him out of school the next day.

She said:

“At this point it was getting weird. He had reverted to being a 2-year-old. We took him to get some food, and he sat there and he had this little metal cow that he was using to make mooing noises.

“And his ability to put sentences together had declined dramatically. This is a kid who in fifth grade, was scoring high on what’s called the AMC 8 test, which is a mathematics test for eighth graders. And that day, he could hardly put words together into a sentence.”

The family struggled to find a place that could do the appropriate blood tests, although she did finally find an out-of-network provider. A neurologist told her it was late for a tic to present, but that Max probably just had tourette syndrome.

Max also experienced behavioral problems. He had panic attacks and would scream hysterically.

She reached out to the city for help, but got no response. Finally, through Facebook, she connected with Lorna Rosenstein, executive director of Waterwatch of Utah, who “was like my fairy godmother.”

Rosenstein, who had been active in attempting to end water fluoridation in Utah for years, connected Jenny with fluoride toxicity expert Phyllis Mullenix, Ph.D., who helped develop a treatment plan for Max so his body could eliminate the toxic levels of fluoride from his system.

In addition to a very strict diet, Max had to undergo several rounds of chelation therapy because he also had high levels of lead, arsenic and cadmium in his blood.

Most members of the public are not aware that heavy metals are present in the hydrofluorosilicic acid — a byproduct of the phosphate fertilizer production process — typically used to fluoridate water.

Max also had to do neurological exercises to retrain his brain. As the fluoride was eliminated from his system, his mental health also returned to normal.

None of the treatments were covered by insurance, Jenny said. The family never received any compensation from the city. The school, however, was very responsive. Jenny said they immediately turned off the water fountains and now provide filtered water for all students.

‘I have horrible balance and my sense of body is all screwed up’ 

“It took us about a year to recover him back to normal,” Jenny said. Max no longer has a tic unless he consumes food or drink with fluoride in it. “I can always tell almost immediately when he has eaten rice that’s been cooked in water, it’s not been filtered because he starts to twitch and his face starts to seize.”

Max told The Defender that his only memories of the entire year-long experience were of getting strange soreness at the edge of his eyes. He said he would blink to make it go away. Those were the blackouts.

When Max accidentally consumes something with fluoride in it today — now more than five years later — he experiences that same feeling and has to blink.

He also continues to have shaky hands. “My handwriting is horrible,” he said, so he uses heavy pens to counter the shaking. “I have horrible balance and my sense of body is all screwed up.”

Intellectually, he said, he feels fully recovered.

Max said he was glad to be able to tell his story to the legislators. “It was an acknowledgement,” he said. “It was like, ‘man what this kid went through is unfortunate’ from people on both sides of the water fluoridation debate.”

Max said he hopes his story raises the question for people about whether adding fluoride to water is worth the risk. “Sure, you can brush your teeth with a fluoride toothpaste or drink fluoridated water, but how much goes to your teeth and how much ends up elsewhere?”

“And there can be some freak accident. Is that a risk you are willing to take?”

Water fluoridation accidents occur frequently — but public often last to know

The 2019 accident in Sandy City was just one of many accidental fluoride spills and overfeeds that happen regularly, according to the Fluoride Action Network, which tracks publicly recorded accidents on a webpage.

Accidents range from a small, 10-gallon spill in 2012 in Connecticut to an incident in New Orleans in 2008, where the fluorosilicic acid ate through its storage tanks and then through a concrete containment tank.

In that case, to avoid a “catastrophic mix of toxic chemicals,” the environment department discharged nearly half a million gallons of the toxic acid into the Mississippi River.

Failure to warn the public about fluoride accidents is also common.

Last month in Richmond, Virginia, an accidental fluoride overfeed caused a discharge of approximately 5,900 gallons of fluoride solution into the drinking water. The city said the previous fluoride system had failed in January, and the recent leak occurred during the installation of a new pump.

The leak began on April 23. However, it wasn’t until April 27 — when a Richmond Water Treatment Plant employee called a state agency to report the overflow and said no one was taking action to address the problem — that any state officials even knew about the spill, 6 News Richmond reported.

The City of Richmond had not notified the Virginia Department of Health, neighboring counties or the public.

Officials said the short-term exposure didn’t cause a public health concern. However, that assertion was based on the claim that, “Fluoride levels detected at the Water Treatment Plant were 2.67 milligrams per liter (mg/L) which is below the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) of 4.0 mg/L, the highest level that is allowed in drinking water by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),” the city’s press release said. “The optimal target level of fluoride is 0.7 mg/L.”

While that may be technically true, last year, plaintiffs who sued the EPA alleging fluoride causes damage at levels far below 4.0 mg/L won their case.

A federal judge ordered the EPA to initiate a process to regulate the chemical, finding that it poses an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health even at the recommended 0.7 mg/L levels.

The 2.67 mg/L is several orders of magnitude higher than the level at which exposure for children becomes risky, even though it is under the legal limit, and that limit must now be changed.

The city’s press release warned that children under age 9 could be at risk of dental fluorosis — a tooth discoloration — from the leak and should be provided with an alternative water option.

It did not mention any of the recent research that has been making headlines for the last year, showing that ingesting fluoride is linked to reduced IQ, behavioral issues, disruption of thyroid functioning and the gut microbiome in children.

Nor did it mention the risks to pregnant women.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

May 20, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular | Human rights, United States