Fluoride in tap water

Toothsmith

Shame that after all that reading you still can't spell fluoride though!

jinnan_tonnix

Toothsmith wrote: »

Shame that after all that reading you still can't spell fluoride though!

D'oh. I really must take notice of those red squiggly underlines. I must have 'flour' on the brain.

:rotfl:

Is my face red! Aplogies to all four my bad speling.

tbs624

Typos and/or spelling errors don't negate the content of your post. Red face not necessary

Edit: .........because we all knew that when Toothsmith said:

Toothsmith wrote: »

... does anything detremental to bones at all, ....

and

Toothsmith wrote: »

.....Much like Georbles used propaganda films)...

he probably meant detrimental and Goebbels.

tbs624

jinnan_tonnix wrote: »

Just to add more to the mix, there is a big difference between natural 'fluoride' and artificially added 'fluoride'. I don't think this has been touched on, so apologies if it has.

I (very) briefly alluded to it in response to someone else's statement that "fluoride occurs naturally in tap water anyway".

Differs from fluoride being added.

but then failed to expand on it so it's good that you have gone into detail on that point.

A common source of artificial fluoride is a by-product of the fertiliser industry. A cynical observer may conclude that fluoridation is a convenient method of dumping industrial effluent.

Cynical? Okay, I can cope with that label - count me in

I think the real issue here is that the public should not be subject to mass medication through the water supply.

Absolutely.

Cardelia

On the subject of mass medication:

Chlorination of the water is a form of mass medication. It is easy to prevent water-borne diseases simply by boiling non-chlorinated water before it is used. A program of targeted health education could quite easily make this de rigeur amongst the population, yet the government have chosen the route of adding chlorine to the water supply. I notice that not one of the "fluoride is bad" lobby are campaigning against the mass medication of the population through the addition of chlorine to the water. Yet you're all saying mass medication is ethically and morally wrong. I'm sorry, I don't follow the logic.

jinnan_tonnix wrote: »

So it would seem that comparing natural fluoride levels versus artificial fluoride levels is a bit of a red herring. Natural fluoride is about as toxic as common salt. Artificial fluoride is more toxic than arsenic.

At the concentrations that are found in tap water, this is just rubbish. Neither "natural" nor "artificial" fluoride gets anywhere near the LD50 concentration hence you can't use these numbers as a judge of toxicity for fluoridated tap water. Let me explain:

The concentration of "artificial" fluoride in water is 1 part per million. That's 1 milligram (mg) of fluoride for every 1 litre of water. So, for every litre of tap water you drink, you ingest 1 mg of "artificial" fluoride. If the LD50 of "artificial" fluoride is 125 mg fluoride per kilogram of animal, then for the average person weighing 50 kg you would need to ingest 50 x 125 = 6250 mg of fluoride, in one go, to ingest the LD50. And even then you'd only have a 50% chance of dying.

So, if there's 1 mg artificial fluoride in a litre of tap water and you need to ingest 6250 mg of artificial fluoride for the LD50, then you need to drink 6250 litres of tap water. At once. To put it into some kind of perspective, it's like drinking 20 baths full (to the brim) of water. Never mind the fact the human body isn't big enough to do this, but you would die of hyponatremia well before you finished drinking the first bath.

Fluoride is not a cumulative poison. Therefore, it is physically impossible to get anywhere near the LD50 just by drinking fluoridated tap water. So bringing in these figures serves no useful purpose.

Oh, and for the record, sodium fluoride occurs naturally. As does sodium hexafluorosilicate.

walmslei

Back to my last post I 'd contest the void between 0.2ppm and 1pmm being considered small. It's five times the amount.

Just because the figures are small does not make them insignifcant.

I think someone made the point Cardelia that chlorination was introduced to prevent death. Really it isn't fair to compare this to the process of Fluoridation which isn't to prevent death but frankly (very frankly) to get lazy parents who need a kick up their backside to look after their children properly. Also one aspect no one has considered is even dentists tend to agree that the benefits of fluoridation are really only signficant during TOOTH DEVELOPMENT - topical application of miniscule amounts of fluoride isn't shown to have much benefit (as far as I understand) meaning you are adding this to the water supply literally for the benefit of 10% of the population.

My own child brushes her teeth about four times a day (with a low level fluoride childrens toothpaste) - frankly it costs a pittance - I'd be amazed if it topped out at £1.50 a month. My own point about making toothpaste (and tooth care products) free for children (via schools or via chemists) removes any argument about social/economic divides, and instead squarely puts the focus on parents. Lets face it - if a parent cannot educate a child to brush their teeth I suspect there may be more important issues to deal with which reflect more on our current society/culture than anything else.

On the issue of chlorination - Chlorine (and Chloramine) can both be easily removed from water with cheap filtration products - starting at less than £10 (Chlorine can even be removed for free if left to stand in a pitcher for a couple of hours in the fridge). Chlorine is not necessary to drink, and the long-term evidence on the ingestion of Chlorine is patchy - seriously. The problem is you cannot assess the impact of something like Chlorination over 50 years because too many other environmental factors get in the way, but modern evidence suggests chlorine and chlorine compounds (which occur as a result) such as THMs are heavily suspected as being factors for things like cancer.

The simple fact that some countries encourage fluoridation for scientific reasons and other prohibit it on the same basis makes me as an individual concerned that the whole picture is probably fuzzy at best, and as a result I don't see why the risk needs introducing (if there is one) when there is a viable, more beneficial and probably cheaper alternative - education and provision.

jinnan_tonnix

Cardelia wrote: »

On the subject of mass medication:

Chlorination of the water is a form of mass medication. It is easy to prevent water-borne diseases simply by boiling non-chlorinated water before it is used. A program of targeted health education could quite easily make this de rigeur amongst the population, yet the government have chosen the route of adding chlorine to the water supply. I notice that not one of the "fluoride is bad" lobby are campaigning against the mass medication of the population through the addition of chlorine to the water. Yet you're all saying mass medication is ethically and morally wrong. I'm sorry, I don't follow the logic.

The logic goes something like this:
Chlorine is added to the water to make it safe to drink.
Fluoride serves no such purpose.
This is why I think the chlorine/fluoride argument is a weak one.

This reminds me when I used to camp in the wilds. I used water purifiers such as iodine and dichloroisocyanurate (I had to type that out carefully). Now, the trouble is, I know that this stuff will probably do me no good in the long term, especially in imprecise doses, but compared with catching cryptosporidium or other such nasties, I deemed it the lesser of the two (or multpile) evils. My view on chlorine is the same. To remove it would be far more damaging to the nation's health. I can't find any of these positive arguments for fluoride.

On the subject of the term 'mass medication', I fear we are entering the realms of semantics. Without reaching for a dictionary, I'm pretty sure that medication is the delivery or administration of a medicinal product. Chlorine is not a medication - it has no medicinal properties (in this sense), but as a agent in tap water is performs an effective sterilisation function. It does not provide a benefit for the receiver in a medicinal sense. In my book it's not a medicine, but as I say, it's semantics.

Cardelia wrote: »

At the concentrations that are found in tap water, this is just rubbish. Neither "natural" nor "artificial" fluoride gets anywhere near the LD50 concentration hence you can't use these numbers as a judge of toxicity for fluoridated tap water. Let me explain:

The concentration of "artificial" fluoride in water is 1 part per million. That's 1 milligram (mg) of fluoride for every 1 litre of water. So, for every litre of tap water you drink, you ingest 1 mg of "artificial" fluoride. If the LD50 of "artificial" fluoride is 125 mg fluoride per kilogram of animal, then for the average person weighing 50 kg you would need to ingest 50 x 125 = 6250 mg of fluoride, in one go, to ingest the LD50. And even then you'd only have a 50% chance of dying.

So, if there's 1 mg artificial fluoride in a litre of tap water and you need to ingest 6250 mg of artificial fluoride for the LD50, then you need to drink 6250 litres of tap water. At once. To put it into some kind of perspective, it's like drinking 20 baths full (to the brim) of water. Never mind the fact the human body isn't big enough to do this, but you would die of hyponatremia well before you finished drinking the first bath.

I didn't suggest (or rather I didn't mean to suggest) that the levels of fluoride found in drinking water would cause death, or the risk of death. I wanted to highlight that the fluorides found in natural tap water vs. treated tap water were different substances. Perhaps the way I went about it muddied the waters (if you'll forgive the metaphor). But to take the fact that the natural flouride in the tap water does not appear to cause harm, and to infer from this that a different chemical substance is safe is unsound reasoning.

Cardelia wrote: »

Fluoride is not a cumulative poison. Therefore, it is physically impossible to get anywhere near the LD50 just by drinking fluoridated tap water. So bringing in these figures serves no useful purpose.

It's not cumulative, but it is stored in the bones to the detriment of calcium. I don't know enough about that to comment further.


Cardelia, you do make some good arguments, but nothing I've read has convinced me that water fluoridation is necessary.

As walmslei has pointed out, the solution to good dental care is so easy and cheap that I find it absurd to introduce a chemical to the entire water supply, just in case it might mitigate the poor dental hygiene of a minority of people. For all this effort, only a tiny proportion of the water will be drunk.

Fluoride has its place, but its place is the topical application to the teeth during brushing. It's so simple!

tbs624

Have any of you seen the website of the National Fluoride Information Centre which describes itself as "the independent advice service for England" ? It has a particularly misleading (IMO) leaflet entitled "water fluoridation and children" : this is an example from the leaflet:

WHAT IS WATER FLUORIDATION?
Fluoride is a substance found in large quantities in some rocks in the earth’s surface, and in low amounts in rivers, the sea and naturally in most water supplies.

It's almost lyrical in its description. It makes the whole process sound so benign, and no doubt it will be appearing in a dentists' and/or doctors' waiting room near you shortly, or maybe via a plane drop direct into the school playground.;)

The leaflet can be found in its entirety here; take a look here:http://www.fluorideinformation.com/assets/03leaflet.pdf

The whole site seems so one-sided - if you do a search on infant formula and fluoride, or thyroid and fluoride, for example nothing will be found. Yet, other countries have recommended that non-fluoridated water be used for mixing infant formula, and the health problems regarding thyroid impairment and fluoride have also been highlighted elsewhere.

Toothsmith

walmslei wrote: »

Also one aspect no one has considered is even dentists tend to agree that the benefits of fluoridation are really only signficant during TOOTH DEVELOPMENT - topical application of miniscule amounts of fluoride isn't shown to have much benefit (as far as I understand) meaning you are adding this to the water supply literally for the benefit of 10% of the population.

That was the case until about 8 or 9 years ago, when studies showed that it has beneficial effects on all age groups.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/260862.stm

walmslei wrote: »

My own child brushes her teeth about four times a day (with a low level fluoride childrens toothpaste)

Children's 'low fluoride' toothpastes shouldn't really be used. The fluoride level is too low to have any significant beneficial effects, yet the parent thinks they are protected.

They were produced more for marketing reasons than any health reasons -people wanted low fluoride toothpastes for their kids after reading some of the pseudo science that surrounds the anti-fluoride lobby.

A very small smear of adult toothpaste is the best thing to put on a toddler's brush, increasing to a small pea sized blob when they developthe skill to spit out.

Current advice isthat kids shouldn't then rinse out after brushing, just spit out the excess. That keeps the active ingredients of the toothpaste against the tooth for longer.

Toothsmith

jinnan_tonnix wrote: »

But to take the fact that the natural flouride in the tap water does not appear to cause harm, and to infer from this that a different chemical substance is safe is unsound reasoning.

The F- ion is an F- ion. It doesn't come any simpler. Allthe fluoride salts used to fluoridate water can occur naturally.

In the north-east and I think in some very localised parts of Lincolnshire, the water had such a high natural concentration that it had to be diluted with unfluoridated water to stop the mottling that was occuring in the local populations.

This bit is just from memory, but I think it was through noticing this mottling in certain populations around the world, that the studies began to find out what was causing it. From this work, came other work that found that these populations despite the mottling had fewer cavities. From this came the evidence for fluoride's benefit to teeth, and from this came the dose that wouldn't cause mottling but would still cut down the cavities.

So -it was natural fluoride causing a bit of harm that started everything off.

jinnan_tonnix wrote: »

It's not cumulative, but it is stored in the bones to the detriment of calcium. I don't know enough about that to comment further.

There is no evidence of any detremental effect on the bone. This dosn't stop anti F- s implying it all the time though!