831–840 of 1001 posts
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Pretty much-was told by an insurance broker one of the biggest factors past history of weather and the obvious things (flooding possibility, dry trees) is my neighbors. Didn't get into specifics but I suspect drugs and gangs.
>one of the biggest factors One of the biggest factors of what?
I hear they're going to start adding electrolytes to the plant water though.
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> Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains. You mean like this: Fluoride Exposure and Children’s IQ Scores A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... "Findings: Despite differences in exposure and outcome measures and risk of bias across studies, and when using group-level and individual-level…
Isn't this talking about naturally-occurring fluoridation, not added? The concentrations they describe as having an inverse affect are far higher than what gets added to water on purpose: What the study measured: "For fluoride measured in water, associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L or less than 2 mg/L but not when restricted to less than 1.5 mg/L" And what the US feder…
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> The IQ link is very heavily lacking in evidence. Not really: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
your study has been heavily criticized where you already posted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43523900 I can only assume once you see those very valid criticisms, you will update your references
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What I love about this comment is that one person thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and posted it, and then a bunch of other people thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and upvoted it, and not a single one of them thought to check what the "right thing" is. Meanwhile, back here on Earth-1, there's no right thing, and…
While I acknowledge it is not a "solved" issue, I find it bizarre nonetheless, simply because it is so disproportionately low-stakes compared to the amount of controversy around it. Increased risk of cavities versus tentative evidence of losing 1-2 IQ points at 1.5 mg/L? Sounds like a Monty Python sketch to me that people would get so worked up over this.
The general idea of the government medicating the people writ large isn't low stakes.
In the US there are a lot of people who are of the opinion the government should just let people be.
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This take has a few problems: Poor people in the US are capable of using fluoride toothpaste and flossing. At least at homeless shelters at outreach things I’ve been to, toothpaste and toothbrushes are freely available. Your argument hinges on them being incapable on the whole and needing a Benevolent But Superior Intelligence to provide an alternative for them. Second, it completely ignores any debate over effective…
“Objective truth” - I’d love to know how one goes about this, feels like a Nietzsche reading here would be helpful
With contradictions you know what is not true, and through knowing what is not true, you can approach what is true. Truth is expressed in consistency, not completeness.
That's why anyone should be extremely suspicious of anyone who is not, or doesn't care about, being internally consistent.
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> Except it's not—fluoride in the drinking water concentrations is proven safe and it doesn't affect brains. You mean like this: Fluoride Exposure and Children’s IQ Scores A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... "Findings: Despite differences in exposure and outcome measures and risk of bias across studies, and when using group-level and individual-level…
> For fluoride measured in water, associations remained inverse when exposed groups were restricted to less than 4 mg/L or less than 2 mg/L but not when restricted to less than 1.5 mg/L; So this study found no negative effects on IQ when the fluoride concentration is less than 1.5mg/L The U.S. Public Health Service recommends 0.7mg/L of fluoride[1]. This study supports the idea that the amount of fluoride used in the…
This is one of these US-specific polarised debates I find really bizarre, around some kind of issue that the rest of the world has by large solved but without any acknowledgement of this fact. Maybe the US should look into how other countries have solved it? It is completely bizarre witnessing both sides getting so polarised around a basically non-issue.
For context... some people think statins should be put in the water. Maybe they should. But were does mass medication of the people stop?
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> Thoroughly scientifically debunked. Repeatedly, over decades. "The NTP monograph concluded, with moderate confidence, that higher levels of fluoride exposure, such as drinking water containing more than 1.5 milligrams of fluoride per liter, are associated with lower IQ in children" This is from an NIH meta-analysis. Its a pretty rigorous study. https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/... "It is…
> It is IMO both very reasonable to fund more research into this to know conclusively if 0.7mg/L is indeed safe How exactly do you propose we do this? It's tough to prove absence of harm. The meta-analysis put together tons of research under different situations, and found a weak and relatively small dose-response relationship above 1.0 mg/L and failed to find a relationship below. The evidence between 1.0mg/L and 1.…
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
The Cochrane Collaboration's research is near the gold standard, and yet they find surprisingly limited evidence of benefit for CWF in the modern research:
"These low‐certainty findings (a 4 percentage point difference and 3 percentage point difference for primary and permanent dentition, respectively) favoured CWF."
3-4% reduction in cavities is not nothing, but it's a far cry from the 60% drop observed in the 1940s and certainly much less than what I think most strong proponents of water fluoridation would have you believe. The ongoing discussion I find quite legitimate given we're no longer living in the 1940s and CWF seems to have a substantially lower benefit than it once did, and likewise we do notice a concerning trend with fluorine neurotoxicity that has only emerged in the last few decades of research.
Public health policy is all about a risk/benefit analysis, and CWF is one of those topics that I feel legitimately should be discussed because much has changed over the many decades since the US first introduced it and since then the risks seemingly have gone up and the benefit has astronomically gone down.
Again, I do not think there'd be much discussion if current water fluorination was at 0.15mg/L, and we started seeing a negative trend at 1.5mg/L. But I don't think its actually at all unreasonable for public health officials to be worried and possibly start considering alternatives to CWF out of an abundance of caution.
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So if the Science™ said it was good to add antibiotics (reduces illness!) and anti-psychotics (reduces violence!) to the water supply, you'd be for it?
That’s an even stupider comparison than the antibiotics one. Let’s dismantle what you did here that you think is so clever. You took an absurd comparison of a tried and tested naturally occurring substance with a substance that public health professionals are trying to get us to use less of. You took that, and replaced it with an even more far-fetched and even more generalised hypothetical. At least, given your ignor…