The new research is the first to measure community water fluoridation exposure during childhood and any potential impact on cognition up to age 80.

The paper is here

  • Hawke@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    That’ll be a risk if you have pure sodium fluoride sitting around. Fortunately “no one” does. (Yes, industrial toothpaste manufacturing workers might have an opportunity to be exposed to such a thing).

    Typical toothpaste is 1000-1100 ppm of sodium fluoride. “Prescription strength” is about 5000 ppm. So to hit your target LD50 you need to eat around 10 g of toothpaste per kg. Assuming on the extremely small end (40 kg bodyweight): if I did my math right, that’s about 400 g of prescription strength toothpaste, or more than two (170 g) tubes.

    Normal toothpaste (1100 ppm) for a normal person (80 kg female average), you need to eat more than 22 tubes of toothpaste to kill half the people involved.

    Thats just stupid, there’s zero risk of any of that happening.

    • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
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      4 days ago

      Look, I’m not saying the average consumer will ever run into this risk, I’m saying that you shouldn’t go around saying H301 acutely toxic chemicals are as safe to ingest as bananas. You’re not the president of the United States.

      • village604@adultswim.fan
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        3 days ago

        That’s not what they were saying. They were saying the levels in drinking water are so low that it’s comparable to radiation levels in bananas.

        As in, you’d need to consume so much for it to be lethal that you’d have to be intentionally doing it to cause harm to yourself.

        • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
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          3 days ago

          I believe it is what they meant to say, but it is simply not what they said.

          The big issue is that the process to make ground water safe to drink removes the Sodium Flouride from it. We have to add it back in, unless you live in a town like mine where they decided to stop flouridating the water because they believe in conspiracy theories and Facebook science.

          The levels you need to consume to cause harm are pretty substantial. You would have to be intentionally consuming a LOT of Sodium Flouride to cause issues. It’s almost on the level of “how many bananas do you need to eat to get radiation poisoning”.

          The bolded sentence is unambiguous. It uses no prepositions, no context-dependent phrases, no complex punctuation. It is a simple sentence ending in a full stop. How can you deny this is what they said?