First, I agree that topical application of fluoride is probably better for dental health. And I agree there is such a thing as too much fluoride, I recently learned it’s a pretty widespread problem in India because there is just a lot of it in the ground water. But as someone with a couple stained pitted teeth, who has never had a cavity in his life despite terrible dental hygiene… I think there is also such a thing as a healthy amount of fluorosis.
I have friends from Lubbock, Amarillo and other smaller towns in west Texas. They all have brownish teeth to a greater or lesser degree. Dental fluorosis is a thing.
For the incredulous who maintain there can never be too much fluoride in a municipal water supply, do an image search on dental fluorosis. It is not for the squeamish.
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That doesn’t follow at all.
Things are toxic because of what they do to biology. Not what they’re produced from.
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“Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children’s ice cream!..You know when fluoridation began?..1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works. I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love… Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I — I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake…but I do deny them my essence”
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Yes, but toxicity is a matter of dose, and there are things which are both more toxic than NaF and which we actually require physiologically, like vitamin D3. Lead is less toxic than an essential vitamin that you receive a daily dose of on a dose model. Dose is only facet, of course, but I find it’s unhelpful to label things as toxic free from any context. Calling a warfarin-based Rat poison toxic is reasonable, because it’s in a bottle and prepared in a manner where it is likely to poison something, even if it’s just rats. Calling physician administered warfarin toxic is kind of shedding any use the word “toxic” might actually have in discourse. Context really matters here.
One of the issues with public health in the discourse is that it uses a form of reasoning too many people are unfamiliar with: Abductive reasoning. We look to the best explanation with the evidence available. Nothing can be ruled out over a long-enough time span. People are really uncomfortable with this in public health, because we’re trained to be by the media we consume, but super impressed when Sherlock Holmes (or his many adaptations) uses it in fiction, or our doctors in a more personal setting (because we’re trained to be?)
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Well in a long enough time span we all die from something. I am taking 2 drugs for my blood pressure which may not be great for me but the risks of the drugs are less than the risks hypertension so drugs it is.
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In practical terms, it’s more likely to be the chlorine in your water. But it’s either that or your kids die of shigellosis.
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now all the kids will want that…
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Off topic but,
Is it just me or does the phrase “abductive reasoning” sound like kidnapping the interlocutor and sending their loved ones’ their toes until everyone agrees with the point you’re trying to make?
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My maternal grandparents came from Eastern Europe, a tiny village, and were born in the early 1900’s. One of them lost all his teeth by the time he was middle aged, the other never had a cavity, ever, (and died with all her teeth healthy and strong) but they both basically had the same exposure to fluoride (meaning: almost none for their early lives) and the same dental health regimen. I grew up with fluoridated water, brushed every day, and still got cavities. In short, genes have as much to do with dental health as fluoride.
BTW-- I’m not anti-fluoridation, quite the opposite, but I do know a couple people who were somehow exposed to too much fluoride and now bemoan the state of their teeth. I’m not making an all or nothing argument, fluoride isn’t some international reptilian conspiracy, and it is good for teeth in the right doses, but at high doses it’s bad, like a lot of things.
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I’ve learned a lot in this thread - not enough to completely change my mind, but enough to rethink some things and read some more.
Despite a formal training in science and 6 years in grad school I was unfamiliar with the term abductive reasoning - I thought you were autocorrected from deductive. I’d disagree that Sherlock Holmes uses abductive reasoning; his whole shtick is that he’s the essential deductive reasoner, but most other cops and detectives probably use it and the medical profession is full of it.
Maybe that explains why I am very suspicious of MDs saying “let’s try…” to which my response is always, let’s not. We’ll figure out WTF is going on before we try random treatments.
Anyway, thanks to those who were polite and informative in their responses and educated me on some things.
Next question - if fluoride is good, why not just put tetracycline into drinking water and cure a bunch of other more serious issues than dental caries? Where does that analogy break down?
Two things: near-up-to-fatal allergies, and antibiotic resistant bacteria.
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Because literally every chemical is, including water. So nice rhetorical scare tactics, but NO, it’s not toxic at the exposure levels in municipal fluoridation programs.
And I would simply rather you did not have the choice to increase dental carries in—mostly poor—children, adults, incidence rates of periodontal disease, CHD, and CHD-related death. There is no ideologically or ethically “neutral” position that your interests are occupying and being deviated from by municipal water fluoridation. I do get the appeal of autonomy, especially over one’s body, but that’s not an absolute. The argument that individuals, including children too young to understand these concepts, should just purchase (less effective) individual fluoride supplements is a neoliberal ‘solution’ to the public good of water fluoridation.
This! It is really a shame that there aren’t more meta-analyses, and more public awareness of what meta-analyses are, and that they (when done well) evaluate the whole body of the evidence, including when there’s conflicting evidence.
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You are pulling the bullshit “toxic waste” rhetorical trope, as though the use of fluorosilicic acid—produced as a by product of phosphorus extraction from fluorine-bearing minerals—is simply chucking buckets of fly ash off a burn reactor wall, and indiscriminately pouring it into a water supply, as though “toxic” applies to some substances, but not to others, as though recycling material flows is somehow less ecologically and socially responsible than creating hug pits of agglomerated wast from many sources.
Fluorosilicic acid is a “toxic waste” product as much as baking soda is a toxic waste product.
Take that with a grain of NaCl.
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So, I’m not. I was commenting on how Portland’s plan was specifically buying flourosilicic acid from a factory which had previously paid to dispose of it.
So quite fucking literally, buying industrial waste. I’m not a chemist, nor a public health person. I’m not even categorically opposed to flouridation (although it seems obvious to me that there would be little to no need for it if we had universal healthcare.) But I do know that water is wet, and that byproducts of industrial production are industrial waste. And I’m strongly opposed to my tax dollars paying a factory for it. If anything, they should fucking pay us.
ETA: fwiw, the Portland plan also called for additives to be introduced to the water supply which were needed to guard against corrosion from the introduction of FA. To repeat, I am not a chemist. But I don’t think it takes a degree to understand that if a chemical can corrode pipe it very well can damage other things.
As well make the argument, “Two of the ingredients of this chemical are a metal that’s so reactive and a gas that’s so poisonous that it was used in battle in the First World War!” - yeah, right, and when you react the two, you get NaCl. Entirely indistinguishable from NaCl from any other source.
By the way, that NaCl is almost as corrosive to pipes as NaF. I once lived in a town that had a major unplanned expenditure of tax money after its fire brigade drafted from salt water to fight a waterfront fire. A tremendous amount of fire engine plumbing had to be completely replaced because the salt had eaten it. And you put that corrosive chemical - which was likely a byproduct of an industrial process - on your food!
F- has a very broad therapeutic range between where it’s effective for tooth decay prevention and where it shows any toxic effects, including dental and bone fluorosis. Virtually all fluorosis cases are from other sources, including especially municipal water supplies drawing from excessively high fluoride ground water.
Chemicals don’t magically acquire evil properties because they’re produced as a byproduct of another industrial process. In fact, we have many, many fewer problems with industrial waste when we call it industrial byproducts - they turn it over to Sales who find a use for it, rather than turn it over to Purchasing who are simply interested in getting rid of it as cheaply as possible. One example win is that my brother’s town used to have a paper mill that horribly polluted the river. The paper mill installed evaporators for the spent sulfite liquor, and found that it could sell the lignosulfonate at a handsome price to a nearby cement company as a plasticizer. The cement company saved money on shipping the lignosulfonate, the paper company made money selling what had formerly been waste, and the waste was no longer in the river.
And your statement, “I’m not a chemist nor a public health person” says it all. You are implying thereby that you are more qualified to make the decision than someone who is a chemist or a public health person. Probably your next move will be to call me elitist. Well, to borrow a leaf from Richard Dawkins’s book, I am. If I need someone cutting and sewing on my body, I want an elite surgeon doing it, and an elite anaesthesiologist keeping me alive for it. If my car needs work, I want an elite mechanic. And in making the decisions over my municipal water supply, I do want elite chemists, microbiologists, and sanitarians setting the standards.
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For some reason my quote function isn’t working so I’m not going to take the time parse our most of your response, however for the most part they are a variation of “no shit, Sherlock,” particularly your flourish of: cuz, salt, you idiot. I’m well aware that oxygen can be toxic, too. Yet hear I live and breathe.
Quite honestly, what you really sound like- at least in this response, is a technocrat. You don’t sound like an elitist. Elitists don’t give a fuck if my or my neighbors teeth rot out of our skulls. Elitists own the factories that we pay to dump their trash into our water supply. What you are is a technocrat. You are the one who’s done the studies which show that it’s best we dump the elitists trash in our water. You are the ones who wrote the laws enabling it. The laws we can’t understand, because you wrote them that way. You also drew up the contracts, and sent the money. Lastly, you were the ones who told us that, despite our silly plebe fears, everything will be great, never fear. And yet here we sit, the unwashed, stupid, non-expert masses, paying for every last dime when it goes tits up. We pay for it in blood.
…
As for me, I certainly believe that any collective decision making process should be guided by the best available information. At this point in history, any other approach is certainly… anthrocidal. When I say I am not a chemist, i definitely mean that I do not possess the knowledge judge the safety of adding flourosilicic acid to our water supply. That adding this source of fluoride to our water also requires the addition of additional agents so that it doesn’t destroy the infrastructure is enough to give me pause and consider that this might not be the best available option. My knowledge in other areas informs me that, in fact, a better option exists: routine dental care for everyone.
I ain’t payin some elitist to dump their trash in my water. The biologist that lives across from me didn’t want to, either. W/e. Rant over.
When I was a kid (I’m an old man, I was born before most of the fluoridation controversy of the '60s happened!) my town didn’t have fluoridation, and the municipal water was quite low in F-. For me, said routine dental care included fluoride supplementation - I took a pill every night for years - because everyone in the town was fluoride-deficient. Most of my schoolmates had terrible teeth, despite the fact that their habits were no different from mine (except that their dentists didn’t do supplementation - mine was apparently ahead of the curve).
I can’t find anywhere that explicitly says the source of the Portland proposal was from chemical waste previously being paid for to be deposed of. All I can find is Clean Water Portland’s eludation without foundation, and the proposed budget for the project would make buying any consumed material with a multi-million dollar price tag impossible. The initial set up had a $5M price tag, but the yearly cost after the first was in the few hundreds of thousands dollar range for all repeating costs including maintenance and labor costs.
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