11 ms·

Court tells EPA to consider fluoride risk

67 points by EA-3167 2y ago

BWStearns 2y ago
General Ripper is thrilled at Chevron being overturned.
- foreigner 2y ago
  Children's ice cream, Mandrake?
- quote_servant 2y ago
  Sigh, the downvotes are cultural heresy (Dr Strangelove): Ripper: Mandrake. Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure-grain alcohol? Mandrake: Well, it did occur to me, Jack, yes. Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation. Fluoridation of water? Mandrake: Uh? Yes, I-I have heard of that, Jack, yes. Yes. Ripper: Well, do you know what it is? Mandrake: No, no I don't know what it is, no. Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face? This is just funny, I'm also against adding elements to drinking water. Fluoride can be added to salt brands, so that people have choice.
  - BWStearns 2y ago
    It's one of my favorite movies lol. I don't have super strong feelings on fluoridation one way or the other. Mostly because I'm not a doctor, dentist, or scientist, so my opinion on the matter shouldn't carry much weight. My main issue is that I suspect the judge and plaintiff's reasoning about this issue are roughly on par with that of Gen Ripper. Fluoridation or not is almost certainly not a huge impact (given that there's no obvious large scale harm and we've run a very large natural experiment). I'm worried that this is a preview for more meaningful health and science issues where unserious concerns might draw a sympathetic judge and harm public policy.
    - cryptonector 2y ago
      > so my opinion on the matter shouldn't carry much weight If you ask N doctors you'll get N answers about all sorts of things. The received wisdom can be wrong. You have to at least demand that the science to back up <fill in the blank invasive public policy> is solid, and you should at least do a cursory check that it is.
      - BWStearns 2y ago
        I did do a cursory check. There is a broad consensus that fluoridation is at least not harmful, and that it has good dental outcomes. It is extremely well studied and we have decades of solid natural experiments because advanced nations are not in lockstep on this policy and so we have control cases. The conversation does not need my opinion derived from surveying various Youtube channels for dissenting opinions. It, and most conversations surrounding complex technical scientific matters, does need our default position to be humble about what we actually bring to the table.
        cryptonector 2y ago
        Who said anything about youtube? Humility about what you put in other people's bodies who didn't consent??
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Stay away from my precious bodily fluids.
AlexandrB 2y ago
Last time there was a campaign against fluoridation in my town it was extremely innumerate and resorted to emotional appeals like "do you want chemicals in your water"? That has coloured, perhaps unfairly, my perception of the issue ever since.
- rozap 2y ago
  This sort of reactionary perception against dumb people yelling about stuff is just as emotionally driven as the yelling itself. Just because someone makes a bad argument, doesn't mean the inverse position is true by default, it just means they made a bad argument. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while :) I don't know if fluoride in the water is bad. But you cannot let yourself be driven to a position because the wrong type of people are taking the other position. That type of decision making is devoid of all logic, even though you got there by reacting against a position that was devoid of all logic. You need to get to a position by tuning the emotion out.
  - Retric 2y ago
    The number of untrue things vastly outweighs the number of true things. So the public can ignore ideas championed solely by idiots. Not because idiots are necessarily wrong, but simply because looking at random noise isn’t productive use of time. A similar argument counters Pascal’s wager. There’s hypothetically infinite potential ways to end up in eternal suffering and for any ways to avoid it there’s the possibility that doing to opposite is in fact required. Thus the potential downside alone isn’t enough to compel action without some other reason to suspect a particular belief system is correct.
    - reducesuffering 2y ago
      > So the public can ignore ideas championed solely by idiots Is that the case here? Solely? Most of the world doesn't fluoridate their water.
      - Retric 2y ago
rgrieselhuber 2y ago
Will be very happy to see the prevailing “wisdom” on this eventually get reversed.
- the_gorilla 2y ago
  If it does turn out that the government has been poisoning Americans for decades, I'd like to see some heads roll.
cheeseomlit 2y ago
My understanding is that fluoride is supposed to be applied topically, not ingested (hence the poison control warnings on toothpaste packaging). I'm also curious to what extent research has been done all the other things fluoridated water is used for- bathing, cooking, pets, plants, etc. And the perverse incentives involved make me innately distrustful- the source of the fluoride for example (per this page that has apparently been removed from cdc.gov) https://web.archive.org/web/20240223213812/https://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/engineering/engineering-shortages.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20240223213812/https://www.cdc.g... >The three fluoride additives used for water fluoridation are derived principally from phosphate fertilizer production.
- strbean 2y ago
  I'm fairly conspiracy-minded, but fluoride is prescribed for ingestion in some cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_therapy I was prescribed fluoride tablets by my dentist as kid.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  Your fluoride toothpaste has much, much more fluoride in it per gram than municipally fluoridated water does. That, along with a bunch of other additives, is why it has a poison control warning. (A typical dab of fluoridated toothpaste has roughly as much fluoride as 2L of municipally fluoridated water.) The "it's a side product of industrial processes" argument is emotively salient for a lot of people. But it's worth noting that a lot of things are industrial side products: you presumably don't believe that bran is dangerous just because it's by-produced by milling flour.
  - stuaxo 2y ago
    Children have less fluoride in toothpaste, they also tend to just eat or swallow the toothpaste.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      I have seen many times this argument about children who cannot be taught that the toothpaste must not be swallowed, but I am skeptical about how many such children exist. As a small child, I certainly did plenty of stupid things, but none was of this kind. Perhaps that was due to the fact that my parents never imposed arbitrary prohibitions, but they always explained why it would be bad to do something that was forbidden for me. So if they said that toothpaste must not be swallowed, because it is toxic, I never swallowed it. Therefore I believe that if there exist such children who swallow toothpaste, that is entirely the fault of their parents. This is not a more normal behavior than eating stones or any other objects. Any children who are old enough to be able to wash their teeth by themselves should be old enough to know what may be eaten and what must not be eaten.
lupusreal 2y ago
Why stop at adding fluoride? I think we should be adding small amounts of lithium to public water. The public mental health benefits could be enormous. Throw in some iodine too for good measure.
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  While we're at it, add microdosing semaglutide.
  - trashface 2y ago
    Might as well add Adderall. Boost that GDP!
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  [flagged]
- outworlder 2y ago
  > Throw in some iodine too for good measure. Iodine is added to salt, so no need.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Though not Kosher salt, or most "premium" salts, or any of that Himalayan salt. Be careful that on your quest for the most gourmet salt you don't prevent your children from getting enough iodine!
- advisedwang 2y ago
  The US does already provide iodine supplementation, just via table salt and not water (I suspect because it's a more convenient way to deliver such supplementation)
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    I almost never use table salt, but most prepared/processed food is loaded with salt. Is that salt typically iodized?
LocalPCGuy 2y ago
It should be noted that this ruling has numerous problems from a scientific point of view, as does the NLP report that was relied on. I'm not opposed to validating safety of anything we're doing at a significant amount like this, but I remain heavily skeptical of this case and it's conclusions. And I have concerns about the knee-jerk reactions being seen already in some communities. I know some (if not a lot) of the confusion is the media headlines, but the ruling does seem to lend itself to being reported with significant bias and misrepresentations. > Chen, in his ruling, leans heavily on the NTP report. Even though the report points to evidence of harm only at levels more than double the 0.7 mg/L found in U.S. tap water > Some critics have said that the research behind these conclusions is riddled with problems. ... > “The bottom line,” said Tomar, “is that the overwhelming majority of those studies had either significant flaws or were, frankly, just not looked at through a critical eye.” Contradicting studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36214232/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36214232/ > Exposure to fluoridated water during the first 5 y of life was not associated with altered measures of child emotional and behavioral development and executive functioning. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935121014821 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512... > In boys, positive associations were observed between MUFcr and scores in cognitive domains at the age of 4. These findings are inconsistent with those from some previous studies and indicate the need for other population-based studies to confirm or overturn these results at low levels of F in CDW. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261729/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261729/ > In conclusion, based on the totality of currently available scientific evidence, the present review does not support the presumption that fluoride should be assessed as a human developmental neurotoxicant at the current exposure levels in Europe. > ... the experimental evidence suggests that current exposure to fluoride, even for individuals with relatively high fluoride intake, is clearly below levels that lead to adverse effects in vitro or in animals. > ... The discrepancy between experimental and epidemiological evidence may be reconciled with deficiencies inherent in most epidemiological studies
- kaibee 2y ago
  Do kids consume tap-water equally? I don't know how to check this. I'd imagine one family that cooks a lot of meals where you're just cooking in tap-water (spaghetti, etc), could end up having a lot more fluoride than a family that eats more like, rice, which absorbs a lot more water? Also dishes that involve longer cooking times where you end up reducing the tap-water more? At a population level, you might end up with increased variance in the same bounds?
bitshiftfaced 2y ago
What is the scientific evidence against water fluoridation?
- Eumenes 2y ago
  https://apnews.com/article/fluoride-water-brain-neurology-iq-0a671d2de3b386947e2bd5a661f437a5 https://apnews.com/article/fluoride-water-brain-neurology-iq...
- woodruffw 2y ago
  There's decent evidence that excessive fluoridation can cause developmental issues. Most advocacy around decreasing or eliminating water fluoridation comes from incorrectly extending that to the levels that are present in municipally fluoridated water, which are typically half or less than half of the generally recognized safe level. (A good proxy for this stuff is asking anti-fluoridation advocates whether they eschew green/black tea or defluoridate their groundwater. If they don't do either, then they're almost certainly in the "precious bodily fluids" crank camp.)
  - lo_zamoyski 2y ago
    > (A good proxy for this stuff is asking anti-fluoridation advocates whether they eschew green/black tea or defluoridate their groundwater. If they don't do either, then they're almost certainly in the "precious bodily fluids" crank camp.) Could be, but not necessarily. It depends on the justification given. You can choose to drink green/black tea or not, but you can't really choose where you have fluoride in your tap water, at least not practically.
    - woodruffw 2y ago
      That's why I included groundwater defluoridation as a criterion. But that's also why it's a proxy, not a surefire way to determine someone's crank status. I'm sympathetic to the consent argument, on principle. But in practice people seem to have no objection to the government eliminating other degrees of choice, like drunk driving or sending your unvaccinated kids to school. So claims that municipal fluoridation at safe levels is a unique violation of consent comes across as special pleading.
woodruffw 2y ago
Discussed indirectly about a week ago[1]. Two notes: 1. The statue that enables these kinds of reviews has a weak evidentiary standard (specifically, preponderance). In other words: it would have been unusual for a judge to deny the request unless it was completely specious. 2. There's no particular indication, either in terms of policy or new research, that the EPA's recognized safe levels for water fluoridation are actually unsafe. From a strategic perspective, it's simpler for the courts to accept a (de facto) weaker than preponderant standard and kick the relitigation of water fluoridation to the EPA, rather than deal with an inevitable avalanche of lawsuits claiming that the truth is being suppressed. It's better (and cheaper) to just do the research again (for the Nth time). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757346
- stuaxo 2y ago
  The thing that makes me wonder is one thing about how it works: it changes how teeth grow, so there are less ridges, that seems like quite a big effect, and makes me wonder about effects on the rest of the body.
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    Do you have a citation for that? Fluoride’s effects at normal municipal levels are exceedingly well studied. (These threads seem to need this said perpetually: nobody is claiming that you can drink a glass of fluoride and be perfectly fine. It’s all about dosage and uptake.)
    - Steven420 2y ago
      The problem I think is that the dosage is unknown. Many foods contain high levels of fluoride that can combine with the fluoride in your water to bring you over the supposed safe level.
      - woodruffw 2y ago
        There are two key points here: 1. The main dietary source of extra fluoride for most people is tea. 2. There’s strong evidence that adults don’t experience detrimental effects from much higher proportions of dietary fluoride — even the most recent skeptic fodder (the NTP manuscript) finds no effect on adults at concentrations an order of magnitude greater than municipal fluoridation can provide. Put together, it’s unlikely that the demographics most susceptible to higher doses of dietary fluoride (meaning children) are receiving those doses. But if you’re worried about your dietary fluoride intake as an adult, you should consider not drinking tea.
DrillShopper 2y ago
[flagged]
- woodruffw 2y ago
  I'm not sure -- I think that would depend on whether the EPA is statutorily enabled to research and issue public health determinations on water fluoridation, or whether that scope has been established indirectly via deference. But given that the statue in this case specifically enables compelling the EPA to re-conduct reviews, I don't think CD is an immediate concern.
- jtbayly 2y ago
  You think anti-fluoride activists are all on the right politically? I would be shocked if that were true, given that some of the most anti-vaccination people are radical leftists.
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    It's a bipartisan conspiracy, for sure. But I don't think the push for eliminating the Chevron Deference came meaningfully from the left, so any left-crank use of it is more opportunistic than strategic. (I leave it open to your judgement whether it matters that it's opportunistic instead of strategic!)
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Anti-vaxers are mostly right wing politically these days. Not sure when that changed. However, anti-flouride activists have always been right wing due to the LDS (Mormon) Church being the largest pusher of such resistance (at least here in the western USA).
    - wakawaka28 2y ago
      Like RFK Jr.? He's not right wing. The left simply redefines everything so that if you disagree with them even 1%, you're a far right radical in their book. There are LOTS of hippie types that want nothing to do with toxic waste like fluoride. I've seen some that don't even want to use mass-produced soap because it contains random chemicals.
Eumenes 2y ago
I stayed with a friend in a major city and got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water from the bathroom sink. Literally tasted/smelled like pool water. Buddy told me the next morning he has a countertop reverse osmosis purifier for that exact reason.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  That's water chlorination, not fluoridation. Different chemical with a completely different purpose.
- rootusrootus 2y ago
  As someone else mentioned, that is chlorine, not fluoride. If it were me, I would test the water for free chlorine and combined chlorine. At generally accepted safe levels (4 ppm or less), chlorine has very little odor; many people cannot detect it at all. Combined chlorine, on the other hand, is the smell most people associate with poorly maintained pool water. And anything above 0 ppm combined chlorine is bad news, especially in drinking water. FWIW, a properly maintained pool should not smell strongly of chlorine, either.
  - coldpie 2y ago
    Indeed. I'd be curious to know what city this was. Most US cities have very high quality tap water, and tap water that contains levels of chlorine sufficient to smell would surely make the news.
    - Eumenes 2y ago
      This was Brooklyn
      - jessekv 2y ago
        Interesting, as NYC is one of the cities that supposedly have a UV kill stage, and mostly use chlorine for residual. https://www.trojantechnologies.com/en/applications/municipal/drinking-water https://www.trojantechnologies.com/en/applications/municipal...
aunty_helen 2y ago
I lost an arguement one time to a guy that was an anti-fluoride nut. My uncle was the same and so I took the pro-fluoride position as the science that he was spewing was dodgey tabloid level material. The arguement ended with me having to admit that I hadn't looked into it closely but had assumed that it was safe because that's what everyone reasonable seemed to be saying. Here's the paragraph from the study that made me change my viewpoint: > Although the studies lacked sufficient detail for the committee to fully assess their quality and relevance to U.S. populations, the consistency of the results appears significant enough to warrant additional research on the effects of fluoride on intelligence. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2006. Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/11571 https://doi.org/10.17226/11571. That's pretty strong language and when it comes to something like mass medicating a 2-3 IQ point drop population wide, with a history of claiming substances like DDT or asbestos being safe right up until the point that it isn't, I think we should err on the side of caution.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  What a nice comment in this thread where others denigrate the anti-fluoride. It's like we have forgotten about Thalidomide and various disasters, and we have forgotten how to do science. Instead we are implored to "trust the science!". You show us that it is possible to question the dogma and research a topic such as this to the point of being able to reach a conclusion such as "more studies needed please thanks".
  - nullc 2y ago
    It's always great when "trust the foo" becomes the reason to not do the foo.
  - avgDev 2y ago
    About 13 years ago I suffered an awful reaction to Cipro. I documented my symptoms and posted to reddit. I was called insane, delusional and a liar. This was in medical and science communities. Since then, Cipro and other flouroquinolone drugs have received a 'black' label and warnings of causing tendonitis and neuropathy. Recently, I learned about Ignaz Semmelweis who many years ago discovered that hand washing significantly reduces the risk of death from childbirth fever. When he presented this idea he was rejected by the medical community. His ideas were dismissed and he was harassed. Today, it is obviously standard procedure to wash hands. In reality this is often still the case today. Science doesn't lie but the data and results can be manipulated especially when there is a personal and financial gain.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
It was so funny when I asked Gemini if fluoridated water is safe, and my next question was "what should I do if there is a release of fluorine gas?" But I didn't attempt to bring attention to the utter cognitive dissonance.
- gruez 2y ago
  "It was so funny when I asked Gemini if sodium chloride is safe, and my next question was "what should I do if there is a release of chlorine gas?""
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    I hope you understand that chlorine is literally a disinfectant that's designed to kill stuff, right? Chlorine doesn't exactly appear naturally in water: humans notice when it stinks. We use chlorine to kill lower forms of life. It's only safe when it's in a concentration that won't kill us, nor noticeably harm us. At least with chlorine, they admit that's the goal is disinfection, rather than pretending it's beneficial medicine!
- buttercraft 2y ago
  Those two things are not even in the same category.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    That's true! Unlike fluoridated drinking water, fluorine gas may remain in contact with your teeth long enough, and in a high enough concentration, to be clinically significant!
AStonesThrow 2y ago
Here's some "food for thought": Prozac is essentially a fluoride pill. Think about it.
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  It really isn't. There's fluorine in both, but just because two compounds contain the same element doesn't mean they work the same way.
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    I am quite sure that I don't know what you are talking about. Ever since they started me on Prozac, I've been too serene to worry about cavities at all!
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      Protestants eschew the Blessed Virgin Mary and statues of saints until it's time to assemble the Christmas nativity scenes. Hacker News considers homeopathy to be pseudoscience, until it's time to fluoridate their drinking water.
ErikBjare 2y ago
As a Swede I always found it interesting we were one of the few countries which do not flouridate tap water. Our country took a principled stance against mass-medicating the population with fluoride many decades ago, after a lot of push-back from some prominent scientists (including Arvid Carlsson, Nobel-prize recipient for his work on SSRIs).
- _Microft 2y ago
  > As a Swede I always found it interesting we were one of the few countries which do not flouridate tap water. Wikipedia doesn't support this claim. Here are two quotes from different articles: (1) "As of November 2012, a total of about 378 million people worldwide received artificially fluoridated water. The majority of those were in the United States. About 40 million worldwide received water that was naturally fluoridated to recommended levels.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation#Worldwide_prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation#Worldwide_p... (2) "Out of a population of about three-quarters of a billion, under 14 million people (approximately 2%) in Europe receive artificially-fluoridated water. Those people are in the UK (5,797,000), Republic of Ireland (4,780,000), Spain (4,250,000), and Serbia (300,000). The first water fluoridation in Europe was in West Germany and Sweden in 1952, bringing fluoridated water to about 42,000 people. By mid-1962, about 1 million Europeans in 18 communities in 11 countries were receiving fluoridated water.", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country#Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country#...
  - bitshiftfaced 2y ago
    It seems that Sweden no longer adds fluoride, but it's really besides the point since it says, > 57.4 million people receive naturally occurring fluoridated water at or above optimal levels in countries such as Sweden, China, Sri Lanka, Finland, Zimbabwe and Gabon.[1]
- pierrebeaucamp 2y ago
  I hate to cite Wikipedia as a source [1], but it looks like the majority of countries do not add fluoride to tap water (only 24 countries in total do). But Sweden seems to have an interesting history with it indeed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country
tonetegeatinst 2y ago
I miss fluorine. Explosions&Fire just did a great video about it.

67 points by EA-3167 2y ago

BWStearns 2y ago

General Ripper is thrilled at Chevron being overturned.

foreigner 2y ago
Children's ice cream, Mandrake?
quote_servant 2y ago
Sigh, the downvotes are cultural heresy (Dr Strangelove): Ripper: Mandrake. Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure-grain alcohol? Mandrake: Well, it did occur to me, Jack, yes. Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation. Fluoridation of water? Mandrake: Uh? Yes, I-I have heard of that, Jack, yes. Yes. Ripper: Well, do you know what it is? Mandrake: No, no I don't know what it is, no. Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face? This is just funny, I'm also against adding elements to drinking water. Fluoride can be added to salt brands, so that people have choice.
- BWStearns 2y ago
  It's one of my favorite movies lol. I don't have super strong feelings on fluoridation one way or the other. Mostly because I'm not a doctor, dentist, or scientist, so my opinion on the matter shouldn't carry much weight. My main issue is that I suspect the judge and plaintiff's reasoning about this issue are roughly on par with that of Gen Ripper. Fluoridation or not is almost certainly not a huge impact (given that there's no obvious large scale harm and we've run a very large natural experiment). I'm worried that this is a preview for more meaningful health and science issues where unserious concerns might draw a sympathetic judge and harm public policy.
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    > so my opinion on the matter shouldn't carry much weight If you ask N doctors you'll get N answers about all sorts of things. The received wisdom can be wrong. You have to at least demand that the science to back up <fill in the blank invasive public policy> is solid, and you should at least do a cursory check that it is.
    - BWStearns 2y ago
      I did do a cursory check. There is a broad consensus that fluoridation is at least not harmful, and that it has good dental outcomes. It is extremely well studied and we have decades of solid natural experiments because advanced nations are not in lockstep on this policy and so we have control cases. The conversation does not need my opinion derived from surveying various Youtube channels for dissenting opinions. It, and most conversations surrounding complex technical scientific matters, does need our default position to be humble about what we actually bring to the table.
      - cryptonector 2y ago
        Who said anything about youtube? Humility about what you put in other people's bodies who didn't consent??
Spooky23 2y ago
Stay away from my precious bodily fluids.

AlexandrB 2y ago

Last time there was a campaign against fluoridation in my town it was extremely innumerate and resorted to emotional appeals like "do you want chemicals in your water"? That has coloured, perhaps unfairly, my perception of the issue ever since.

rozap 2y ago
This sort of reactionary perception against dumb people yelling about stuff is just as emotionally driven as the yelling itself. Just because someone makes a bad argument, doesn't mean the inverse position is true by default, it just means they made a bad argument. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while :) I don't know if fluoride in the water is bad. But you cannot let yourself be driven to a position because the wrong type of people are taking the other position. That type of decision making is devoid of all logic, even though you got there by reacting against a position that was devoid of all logic. You need to get to a position by tuning the emotion out.
- Retric 2y ago
  The number of untrue things vastly outweighs the number of true things. So the public can ignore ideas championed solely by idiots. Not because idiots are necessarily wrong, but simply because looking at random noise isn’t productive use of time. A similar argument counters Pascal’s wager. There’s hypothetically infinite potential ways to end up in eternal suffering and for any ways to avoid it there’s the possibility that doing to opposite is in fact required. Thus the potential downside alone isn’t enough to compel action without some other reason to suspect a particular belief system is correct.
  - reducesuffering 2y ago
    > So the public can ignore ideas championed solely by idiots Is that the case here? Solely? Most of the world doesn't fluoridate their water.
    - Retric 2y ago

rgrieselhuber 2y ago

Will be very happy to see the prevailing “wisdom” on this eventually get reversed.

the_gorilla 2y ago
If it does turn out that the government has been poisoning Americans for decades, I'd like to see some heads roll.

cheeseomlit 2y ago

My understanding is that fluoride is supposed to be applied topically, not ingested (hence the poison control warnings on toothpaste packaging). I'm also curious to what extent research has been done all the other things fluoridated water is used for- bathing, cooking, pets, plants, etc. And the perverse incentives involved make me innately distrustful- the source of the fluoride for example (per this page that has apparently been removed from cdc.gov) https://web.archive.org/web/20240223213812/https://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/engineering/engineering-shortages.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20240223213812/https://www.cdc.g... >The three fluoride additives used for water fluoridation are derived principally from phosphate fertilizer production.

strbean 2y ago
I'm fairly conspiracy-minded, but fluoride is prescribed for ingestion in some cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_therapy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoride_therapy I was prescribed fluoride tablets by my dentist as kid.
woodruffw 2y ago
Your fluoride toothpaste has much, much more fluoride in it per gram than municipally fluoridated water does. That, along with a bunch of other additives, is why it has a poison control warning. (A typical dab of fluoridated toothpaste has roughly as much fluoride as 2L of municipally fluoridated water.) The "it's a side product of industrial processes" argument is emotively salient for a lot of people. But it's worth noting that a lot of things are industrial side products: you presumably don't believe that bran is dangerous just because it's by-produced by milling flour.
- stuaxo 2y ago
  Children have less fluoride in toothpaste, they also tend to just eat or swallow the toothpaste.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    I have seen many times this argument about children who cannot be taught that the toothpaste must not be swallowed, but I am skeptical about how many such children exist. As a small child, I certainly did plenty of stupid things, but none was of this kind. Perhaps that was due to the fact that my parents never imposed arbitrary prohibitions, but they always explained why it would be bad to do something that was forbidden for me. So if they said that toothpaste must not be swallowed, because it is toxic, I never swallowed it. Therefore I believe that if there exist such children who swallow toothpaste, that is entirely the fault of their parents. This is not a more normal behavior than eating stones or any other objects. Any children who are old enough to be able to wash their teeth by themselves should be old enough to know what may be eaten and what must not be eaten.

lupusreal 2y ago

Why stop at adding fluoride? I think we should be adding small amounts of lithium to public water. The public mental health benefits could be enormous. Throw in some iodine too for good measure.

rootusrootus 2y ago
While we're at it, add microdosing semaglutide.
- trashface 2y ago
  Might as well add Adderall. Boost that GDP!
unsupp0rted 2y ago
[flagged]
outworlder 2y ago
> Throw in some iodine too for good measure. Iodine is added to salt, so no need.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Though not Kosher salt, or most "premium" salts, or any of that Himalayan salt. Be careful that on your quest for the most gourmet salt you don't prevent your children from getting enough iodine!
advisedwang 2y ago
The US does already provide iodine supplementation, just via table salt and not water (I suspect because it's a more convenient way to deliver such supplementation)
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I almost never use table salt, but most prepared/processed food is loaded with salt. Is that salt typically iodized?

LocalPCGuy 2y ago

It should be noted that this ruling has numerous problems from a scientific point of view, as does the NLP report that was relied on. I'm not opposed to validating safety of anything we're doing at a significant amount like this, but I remain heavily skeptical of this case and it's conclusions. And I have concerns about the knee-jerk reactions being seen already in some communities. I know some (if not a lot) of the confusion is the media headlines, but the ruling does seem to lend itself to being reported with significant bias and misrepresentations. > Chen, in his ruling, leans heavily on the NTP report. Even though the report points to evidence of harm only at levels more than double the 0.7 mg/L found in U.S. tap water > Some critics have said that the research behind these conclusions is riddled with problems. ... > “The bottom line,” said Tomar, “is that the overwhelming majority of those studies had either significant flaws or were, frankly, just not looked at through a critical eye.” Contradicting studies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36214232/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36214232/ > Exposure to fluoridated water during the first 5 y of life was not associated with altered measures of child emotional and behavioral development and executive functioning. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935121014821 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512... > In boys, positive associations were observed between MUFcr and scores in cognitive domains at the age of 4. These findings are inconsistent with those from some previous studies and indicate the need for other population-based studies to confirm or overturn these results at low levels of F in CDW. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261729/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261729/ > In conclusion, based on the totality of currently available scientific evidence, the present review does not support the presumption that fluoride should be assessed as a human developmental neurotoxicant at the current exposure levels in Europe. > ... the experimental evidence suggests that current exposure to fluoride, even for individuals with relatively high fluoride intake, is clearly below levels that lead to adverse effects in vitro or in animals. > ... The discrepancy between experimental and epidemiological evidence may be reconciled with deficiencies inherent in most epidemiological studies

kaibee 2y ago
Do kids consume tap-water equally? I don't know how to check this. I'd imagine one family that cooks a lot of meals where you're just cooking in tap-water (spaghetti, etc), could end up having a lot more fluoride than a family that eats more like, rice, which absorbs a lot more water? Also dishes that involve longer cooking times where you end up reducing the tap-water more? At a population level, you might end up with increased variance in the same bounds?

bitshiftfaced 2y ago

What is the scientific evidence against water fluoridation?

Eumenes 2y ago
https://apnews.com/article/fluoride-water-brain-neurology-iq-0a671d2de3b386947e2bd5a661f437a5 https://apnews.com/article/fluoride-water-brain-neurology-iq...
woodruffw 2y ago
There's decent evidence that excessive fluoridation can cause developmental issues. Most advocacy around decreasing or eliminating water fluoridation comes from incorrectly extending that to the levels that are present in municipally fluoridated water, which are typically half or less than half of the generally recognized safe level. (A good proxy for this stuff is asking anti-fluoridation advocates whether they eschew green/black tea or defluoridate their groundwater. If they don't do either, then they're almost certainly in the "precious bodily fluids" crank camp.)
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  > (A good proxy for this stuff is asking anti-fluoridation advocates whether they eschew green/black tea or defluoridate their groundwater. If they don't do either, then they're almost certainly in the "precious bodily fluids" crank camp.) Could be, but not necessarily. It depends on the justification given. You can choose to drink green/black tea or not, but you can't really choose where you have fluoride in your tap water, at least not practically.
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    That's why I included groundwater defluoridation as a criterion. But that's also why it's a proxy, not a surefire way to determine someone's crank status. I'm sympathetic to the consent argument, on principle. But in practice people seem to have no objection to the government eliminating other degrees of choice, like drunk driving or sending your unvaccinated kids to school. So claims that municipal fluoridation at safe levels is a unique violation of consent comes across as special pleading.

woodruffw 2y ago

Discussed indirectly about a week ago[1]. Two notes: 1. The statue that enables these kinds of reviews has a weak evidentiary standard (specifically, preponderance). In other words: it would have been unusual for a judge to deny the request unless it was completely specious. 2. There's no particular indication, either in terms of policy or new research, that the EPA's recognized safe levels for water fluoridation are actually unsafe. From a strategic perspective, it's simpler for the courts to accept a (de facto) weaker than preponderant standard and kick the relitigation of water fluoridation to the EPA, rather than deal with an inevitable avalanche of lawsuits claiming that the truth is being suppressed. It's better (and cheaper) to just do the research again (for the Nth time). [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41757346

stuaxo 2y ago
The thing that makes me wonder is one thing about how it works: it changes how teeth grow, so there are less ridges, that seems like quite a big effect, and makes me wonder about effects on the rest of the body.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  Do you have a citation for that? Fluoride’s effects at normal municipal levels are exceedingly well studied. (These threads seem to need this said perpetually: nobody is claiming that you can drink a glass of fluoride and be perfectly fine. It’s all about dosage and uptake.)
  - Steven420 2y ago
    The problem I think is that the dosage is unknown. Many foods contain high levels of fluoride that can combine with the fluoride in your water to bring you over the supposed safe level.
    - woodruffw 2y ago
      There are two key points here: 1. The main dietary source of extra fluoride for most people is tea. 2. There’s strong evidence that adults don’t experience detrimental effects from much higher proportions of dietary fluoride — even the most recent skeptic fodder (the NTP manuscript) finds no effect on adults at concentrations an order of magnitude greater than municipal fluoridation can provide. Put together, it’s unlikely that the demographics most susceptible to higher doses of dietary fluoride (meaning children) are receiving those doses. But if you’re worried about your dietary fluoride intake as an adult, you should consider not drinking tea.

DrillShopper 2y ago

[flagged]

woodruffw 2y ago
I'm not sure -- I think that would depend on whether the EPA is statutorily enabled to research and issue public health determinations on water fluoridation, or whether that scope has been established indirectly via deference. But given that the statue in this case specifically enables compelling the EPA to re-conduct reviews, I don't think CD is an immediate concern.
jtbayly 2y ago
You think anti-fluoride activists are all on the right politically? I would be shocked if that were true, given that some of the most anti-vaccination people are radical leftists.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  It's a bipartisan conspiracy, for sure. But I don't think the push for eliminating the Chevron Deference came meaningfully from the left, so any left-crank use of it is more opportunistic than strategic. (I leave it open to your judgement whether it matters that it's opportunistic instead of strategic!)
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Anti-vaxers are mostly right wing politically these days. Not sure when that changed. However, anti-flouride activists have always been right wing due to the LDS (Mormon) Church being the largest pusher of such resistance (at least here in the western USA).
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    Like RFK Jr.? He's not right wing. The left simply redefines everything so that if you disagree with them even 1%, you're a far right radical in their book. There are LOTS of hippie types that want nothing to do with toxic waste like fluoride. I've seen some that don't even want to use mass-produced soap because it contains random chemicals.

Eumenes 2y ago

I stayed with a friend in a major city and got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water from the bathroom sink. Literally tasted/smelled like pool water. Buddy told me the next morning he has a countertop reverse osmosis purifier for that exact reason.

woodruffw 2y ago
That's water chlorination, not fluoridation. Different chemical with a completely different purpose.
rootusrootus 2y ago
As someone else mentioned, that is chlorine, not fluoride. If it were me, I would test the water for free chlorine and combined chlorine. At generally accepted safe levels (4 ppm or less), chlorine has very little odor; many people cannot detect it at all. Combined chlorine, on the other hand, is the smell most people associate with poorly maintained pool water. And anything above 0 ppm combined chlorine is bad news, especially in drinking water. FWIW, a properly maintained pool should not smell strongly of chlorine, either.
- coldpie 2y ago
  Indeed. I'd be curious to know what city this was. Most US cities have very high quality tap water, and tap water that contains levels of chlorine sufficient to smell would surely make the news.
  - Eumenes 2y ago
    This was Brooklyn
    - jessekv 2y ago
      Interesting, as NYC is one of the cities that supposedly have a UV kill stage, and mostly use chlorine for residual. https://www.trojantechnologies.com/en/applications/municipal/drinking-water https://www.trojantechnologies.com/en/applications/municipal...

aunty_helen 2y ago

I lost an arguement one time to a guy that was an anti-fluoride nut. My uncle was the same and so I took the pro-fluoride position as the science that he was spewing was dodgey tabloid level material. The arguement ended with me having to admit that I hadn't looked into it closely but had assumed that it was safe because that's what everyone reasonable seemed to be saying. Here's the paragraph from the study that made me change my viewpoint: > Although the studies lacked sufficient detail for the committee to fully assess their quality and relevance to U.S. populations, the consistency of the results appears significant enough to warrant additional research on the effects of fluoride on intelligence. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2006. Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/11571 https://doi.org/10.17226/11571. That's pretty strong language and when it comes to something like mass medicating a 2-3 IQ point drop population wide, with a history of claiming substances like DDT or asbestos being safe right up until the point that it isn't, I think we should err on the side of caution.

cryptonector 2y ago
What a nice comment in this thread where others denigrate the anti-fluoride. It's like we have forgotten about Thalidomide and various disasters, and we have forgotten how to do science. Instead we are implored to "trust the science!". You show us that it is possible to question the dogma and research a topic such as this to the point of being able to reach a conclusion such as "more studies needed please thanks".
- nullc 2y ago
  It's always great when "trust the foo" becomes the reason to not do the foo.
- avgDev 2y ago
  About 13 years ago I suffered an awful reaction to Cipro. I documented my symptoms and posted to reddit. I was called insane, delusional and a liar. This was in medical and science communities. Since then, Cipro and other flouroquinolone drugs have received a 'black' label and warnings of causing tendonitis and neuropathy. Recently, I learned about Ignaz Semmelweis who many years ago discovered that hand washing significantly reduces the risk of death from childbirth fever. When he presented this idea he was rejected by the medical community. His ideas were dismissed and he was harassed. Today, it is obviously standard procedure to wash hands. In reality this is often still the case today. Science doesn't lie but the data and results can be manipulated especially when there is a personal and financial gain.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

It was so funny when I asked Gemini if fluoridated water is safe, and my next question was "what should I do if there is a release of fluorine gas?" But I didn't attempt to bring attention to the utter cognitive dissonance.

gruez 2y ago
"It was so funny when I asked Gemini if sodium chloride is safe, and my next question was "what should I do if there is a release of chlorine gas?""
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  I hope you understand that chlorine is literally a disinfectant that's designed to kill stuff, right? Chlorine doesn't exactly appear naturally in water: humans notice when it stinks. We use chlorine to kill lower forms of life. It's only safe when it's in a concentration that won't kill us, nor noticeably harm us. At least with chlorine, they admit that's the goal is disinfection, rather than pretending it's beneficial medicine!
buttercraft 2y ago
Those two things are not even in the same category.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  That's true! Unlike fluoridated drinking water, fluorine gas may remain in contact with your teeth long enough, and in a high enough concentration, to be clinically significant!

AStonesThrow 2y ago

Here's some "food for thought": Prozac is essentially a fluoride pill. Think about it.

BenjiWiebe 2y ago
It really isn't. There's fluorine in both, but just because two compounds contain the same element doesn't mean they work the same way.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago
  I am quite sure that I don't know what you are talking about. Ever since they started me on Prozac, I've been too serene to worry about cavities at all!
  - AStonesThrow 2y ago
    Protestants eschew the Blessed Virgin Mary and statues of saints until it's time to assemble the Christmas nativity scenes. Hacker News considers homeopathy to be pseudoscience, until it's time to fluoridate their drinking water.

ErikBjare 2y ago

As a Swede I always found it interesting we were one of the few countries which do not flouridate tap water. Our country took a principled stance against mass-medicating the population with fluoride many decades ago, after a lot of push-back from some prominent scientists (including Arvid Carlsson, Nobel-prize recipient for his work on SSRIs).

_Microft 2y ago
> As a Swede I always found it interesting we were one of the few countries which do not flouridate tap water. Wikipedia doesn't support this claim. Here are two quotes from different articles: (1) "As of November 2012, a total of about 378 million people worldwide received artificially fluoridated water. The majority of those were in the United States. About 40 million worldwide received water that was naturally fluoridated to recommended levels.", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation#Worldwide_prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation#Worldwide_p... (2) "Out of a population of about three-quarters of a billion, under 14 million people (approximately 2%) in Europe receive artificially-fluoridated water. Those people are in the UK (5,797,000), Republic of Ireland (4,780,000), Spain (4,250,000), and Serbia (300,000). The first water fluoridation in Europe was in West Germany and Sweden in 1952, bringing fluoridated water to about 42,000 people. By mid-1962, about 1 million Europeans in 18 communities in 11 countries were receiving fluoridated water.", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country#Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country#...
- bitshiftfaced 2y ago
  It seems that Sweden no longer adds fluoride, but it's really besides the point since it says, > 57.4 million people receive naturally occurring fluoridated water at or above optimal levels in countries such as Sweden, China, Sri Lanka, Finland, Zimbabwe and Gabon.[1]
pierrebeaucamp 2y ago
I hate to cite Wikipedia as a source [1], but it looks like the majority of countries do not add fluoride to tap water (only 24 countries in total do). But Sweden seems to have an interesting history with it indeed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country

tonetegeatinst 2y ago

I miss fluorine. Explosions&Fire just did a great video about it.