there’s a difference in calcium fluoride and sodium fluoride. especially when the sodium fluoride comes from industrial waste which leaves it with all sorts of trace pollutants like mercury and arsenic.
So what? Lots of water sources, natural and public, have arsenic and mercury in them. But they’re well below dangerous concentrations. If the trace additions of heavy metals aren’t significant, then who cares?
Look it, you’re on mises.org…so i assume I’m talking to someone with some sense here…I assume you don’t want government in control of our water supply at all…which, if it was in private hands this wouldn’t even be an issue. I assume we both want the privitization of alot of government controlled things.
Absolutely true, as I said so earlier in the thread. I’m not arguing FOR governmen-funded flouridated water, I’m arguing AGAINST some of, what I see as, hysteria and a myopic reading of available evidence. No disrespect.
But why pay to add those toxins to drinking water?
That’s irrelevent to the point I was repsonding to. You claimed that there was a signifigant difference between calcium flouride and sodium flouride, because one was generated through industrial processes and may contain trace amounts of heavy metals and arsenic. My point was that that made no difference if the amount added was not dangerous.
The real problem you have is obviously that you think the risks of water flouridation outweigh the benefits, and you probably also object to the government-subidisation and state control of public water systems. These are all legitimate issues. But you continue to couch your arguements in irrelevent appeals to emotion.
Furthermore, regarding the articles you posted, none of them tell us that “drinking sodium flouride is bad for your health”. The first reports (and this has been in the news a lot recently) that the recommended flouride concentrations in public water supplies have been reduced. The reasoning for this isn’t that flouride is absolutely bad for humans, but rather that there are a plethora of new products that are flouridated, and people are getting more exposure to it. Since the recommended concentrations are well out of date, they’re being adjusted downward. This isn’t evidence against flourdiation, but rather just another case of the slow response time of government bureuacracy. The second article, again, says nothing about flouridation in general, but rather simply that very high levels of flouride may be bad for bone strength. This is a no brainer and is widely known. It also says nothing about water flouridation being the source of these high concentrations.
Again, these may be relevent to a discussion about “Are flouride levels too high in our drinking water?” but not “Is flouridation an inherently bad idea?” You seem to be arguing the latter.
On a somewhat related note I’ve read of experiments with adding lithium salts to drinking water for the psychological effects. No serious attempts to actually do it on a massive scale or anything just proof of concept stuff. Apparently it works, suicide rates go down.