111–119 of 119 posts
The article refers to compounds found in, for example, firefighting foam and not to the fluoride added for preventing tooth decay.
"A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works." - Dr Strangelove
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly! Everyone's always so worried about fluoride in drinking water, with little justification and without giving a thought to all the chlorine which is often present in far greater concentrations and, in certain conditions, can react with other organic and inorganic compounds to form all sorts of nasties. Get a good filter for your drinking water and most of these concerns vanish. Plus you'll save a fortune on bo…
Recommendations?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonetheless, people in Flint didn't have drinkable water for years. If the agency is so toothless with a highly politicized case like this, you can only imagine how toothless it is when it comes to the less publicized cases. So don't tell me how awesome the EPA currently is. Maybe it could, in fact, benefit from a swift kick in the ass.
They can't do anything with the funding they have, so maybe they'll do better with less funding? That's a non-sequitur.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So this stuff is considered 3000 times as bad as cyanide? That's rather disturbing.
The natural concentration of the weird high molecular weight fluorine compounds is exactly zero, whereas cyanide compounds are natural and show up in small amounts in many fruit seeds, a couple nuts, some root vegetables. Its not physically possible to eat enough apple seeds to get sick, but if you industrially concentrate cyanide by a factor of a hundred thousand or so because its so nifty at plating metals and stuf…
There are plenty of never-been-made-before chemicals that are completely non-toxic and plenty of been-around-forever chemicals that are super toxic (ricin, botulism toxin, etc).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly! Everyone's always so worried about fluoride in drinking water, with little justification and without giving a thought to all the chlorine which is often present in far greater concentrations and, in certain conditions, can react with other organic and inorganic compounds to form all sorts of nasties. Get a good filter for your drinking water and most of these concerns vanish. Plus you'll save a fortune on bo…
If you're worried about chlorine, you don't even need a filter. Put the water in a jug in the fridge for an hour or so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not in any way advocating for toxins in the water supply, but do you worry that news like this will embolden anti-flouride people?
The best way to prevent this, in my opinion, is to be clear that the research has nothing to do with fluoridated water. From my colleague: "The highly fluorinated chemicals that we discussed are organic compounds, meaning that they contain carbon atoms. They are called highly fluorinated or per- and polyfluoro alkyl substances because they have many fluorine atoms, and the carbon atoms are entirely or often bound to…
The masses understand at the soundbite level only. I don't know what to do about this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why weren't the risks better known before? I'm sorry, but the truth here is that DuPont knew for decades and hid those results from the public. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-06/dupont-lo...
Maybe I should have headed that "why weren't the risks obvious at the beginning?". According to the lawsuit DuPont had discovered the risks of perfluorooctanoic acid exposure by 1961. Industrial production of perfluorooctanoic acid began in 1947. Had it been a simple acutely hazardous chemical that killed rats hours after you fed them a few milligrams, the risks wouldn't have taken a decade+ to surface. I'm not tryin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not in any way advocating for toxins in the water supply, but do you worry that news like this will embolden anti-flouride people?
If I understand correctly, I'd rather have cavities than cancer. That is: Flouride is supposed to help prevent tooth decay. This stuff, on the other hand, "has been linked to" cancer (how strongly, I'm not sure). But if warning about a cancer-causer kills flouridation as collateral damage, well, I prefer that to the other way around (not doing anything about the cancer-causer to protect people's teeth).
Nice, an article that links to sources in the prrimary scientific literature! Let's see, the link text says "potent immunotoxicants", that's probably a study about the effects of PFAS on the immune system. But no, it's actually some meaningless bullshit about evolution and doesn't even mention the word "fluor" once. Given that, the term "toxic" is unjustified (it appears that if PFOA is toxic, then so are fatty acids…
Your misunderstanding starts where you're considering the linked article a "primary source". Even though it's at harvard.edu, it's not a peer-reviewed "primary source". Given that the absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence, the conclusion and causation you imply with "given that" is wrong. You're also awfully quick to call stuff you don't understand "bullshit".
The point was that this is bullshit precisely because it pretends to link to a scientific source, but doesn't. Sure, it's still possible that every single word in the article is correct even in the absence of actual research---but is it likely?