Comment Re:Fluoride in drinking water isn't necessary (Score 1, Interesting) 314
Then there's the issue of toxicity, which apparently is essentially nil
Spectacularly wrong.
When you type "fluoride" into Wikipedia, the second auto-suggest is this "Fluoride_toxicity" page.
Then there is this paragraph on an otherwise pro-fluoridation page:
"In India an estimated 60 million people have been poisoned by well water contaminated by excessive fluoride... The effects are particularly evident in the bone deformations of children."
At another pro-fluoridation page, we learn that the natural fluoride levels causing all those poisoned East Indians is 3 to 6 mg/l. Just 6 times the original US national standard forced on two-thirds of the population for the past sixty years.
The normal rule of toxicology is a safety factor of 100. About 100 cups of coffee will kill us, for example. One baby aspirin is 1/200 of the lethal (ld50) dose for an infant. Same as one 200 mg Ibuprofen. But a day's maximum ibuprofen dose is 6% of lethal. One cigarette is 1/80th of lethal. The average US salt consumption of 3.5 g/day is 2% of lethal...and common sense tells us we eat too much salt, on average.
Fluoride's ld50 is 50 mg/Kg. 8 glasses of water is about 2000 grams. Fluoridate at 1 mg/l, we get 2 mg of fluoride just from the water. That is 4% of lethal. And does not include at least 15 other sources of fluoride in our diet.
Stats in the last two paragraphs drawing from "Toxic: How Science Measures Harm"
tldr? Fluoride is more toxic than lead and almost as toxic as arsenic - common knowledge
Saying that something more toxic than lead has "essentially nil" toxicity is my idea of wrong.