As bans spread, fluoride in drinking water divides communities across the US
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It is a scenario playing out nationwide. From Oregon to Pennsylvania, hundreds of communities have in recent years either stopped adding fluoride to their water supplies or voted to prevent its addition. Supporters of such bans argue that people should be given the freedom of choice. The broad availability of over-the-counter dental products containing the mineral makes it no longer necessary to add to public water supplies, they say. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that while store-bought products reduce tooth decay, the greatest protection comes when they are used in combination with water fluoridation.
The outcome of an ongoing federal case in California could force the Environmental Protection Agency to create a rule regulating or banning the use of fluoride in drinking water nationwide. In the meantime, the trend is raising alarm bells for public health researchers who worry that, much like vaccines, fluoride may have become a victim of its own success.
The CDC maintains that community water fluoridation is not only safe and effective but also yields significant cost savings in dental treatment. Public health officials say removing fluoride could be particularly harmful to low-income families — for whom drinking water may be the only source of preventive dental care.
“If you have to go out and get care on your own, it’s a whole different ballgame,” said Myron Allukian Jr., a dentist and past president of the American Public Health Association. Millions of people have lived with fluoridated water for years, “and we’ve had no major health problems,” he said. “It’s much easier to prevent a disease than to treat it.”
According to the anti-fluoride group Fluoride Action Network, since 2010, over 240 communities around the world have removed fluoride from their drinking water or decided not to add it.
So lead, plastic, and PFAS are fine but fluoride is where they draw the line…?
They're also against vaccines because supposedly vaccines will damage their DNA... whereas apparently PFAS don't.
This
I am SO tired of being at the mercy of idiots.
“Never Underestimate The Power Of Stupid People In Large Groups” -George Carlin
No, people shouldn't have the right to choose if fluoride is added to their water. People are stupid. You vote to remove something that will greatly help children that can't vote. The government's job, sometimes, is to stop stupid people from hurting others and their selves. That's the reason you can't drink raw milk or use lead gas.
The raw milk thing is actually part of the reason the FDA was formed!
You can get raw milk if your state allows it. The federal government bans it, but only has regulatory authority over interstate commerce, so it can't be moved across state boundaries, but you can get it if it's made in-state.
I mean, I think that you're mostly aiming to expose yourself to listeria, but if that's what someone wants...
My guess is that dairy farmers have an interest in promoting it in that if they can sell it, it gives them a market without much competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_raw_milk_debate
Drinking milk was a bad example. I should have said sell unpasteurized milk. The point I think we both agree is that stupid for people make stupid decisions. Just like I don't think people can decide about vaccines that have very low risk rates. It effects everyone, not just the idiots.
If stupid people want to make stupid decisions, that’s fine. The problem is when they try to take the rest of society down with them via damage or converting others to that stupidity.
That was my badly worded point. Other are effected by a few people with extra time.
You can drill your own well to get your own water, just like you can have a cow for raw milk.
can we compromise on drinking raw milk with flouride added?
Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!
Well, and TB.
Some of the herd nobly chose to sacrifice itself to improve the genetic resistance of the whole.
Just let them die then, rather than trying to make them age where they don't want to.
That is a completely different argument and has nothing to do with the topic.
We live in the time of the most readily available and advanced information yet continually make the dumbest fucking decisions.
“Cavities…yeah….goddamn hadn’t had one of those in awhile, we should bring those back.”
I’d like to chime in that fluoridation plus a toothpaste containing hydroxyapatite is a game changer; my kids went from several cavities a year to almost none. You used to have to buy japanese toothpastes for this, but it’s starting to show up in america.
The UK used the same argument to stop the addition of iodine to salt. "People already consume enough dietary iodine". You know what happened? Thyroid diseases are on the rise in the UK again, slowly creeping back to early XX century levels.
I think iodine is underappreciated. But also I think fewer and fewer people use the salt shaker because they eat so much processed food (which has salt that is not iodized). Then you're down to milk and seafood. Milk gets it because they use iodine to sanitize the udders. So if you don't drink milk and who eats seafood on most days. Solution to anyone reading: multivitamin.
This. I never add salt to my cooking because there's already so much salt in everything.
Same with Switzerland
You can't trust this stuff. I only drink water straight from the creek and- excuse me, my diarrhea is acting up.
Ban the fluoride and give universal dental care like Canada is planning.
A pipe dream. The dummies will likely just ban the fluoride with no other plan or solution.
Or, ya know, keep the fluoride in the water and also give universal dental care. Removing the fluoride from the water is the more expensive solution.
Yeah, so few people advocate for this though. It's either fluoridation is unbalancing my humors or let's fluoridate a bunch of water that will go down the drain.
USA, can you PPEASE remform your education system and actually ensure that everyone gets a normal and good education? Your idiots are ruining the country.
Also while at it, use that education to teach the kids what freedom really is, how little you really have of it, that boasting about it is dumb, and that using it to make idiotic decisions doesn't make you look awesome, it makes you look like, well, an idiot.
De-education has been an agenda of one of the parties since the eighties, and we're just seeing it take fruit now.
These things take time, and that party plays the 'long game'.
If you honestly don't want fluoride, you can remove it yourself.
Honestly, if you're that paranoid about anything in your drinking water, you'd probably benefit from outright distilling it anyway.
They don't get the choice of whether or not their water is purified either. Damn gubmint!
I mean, people do pay more for mineral water. Yesterday, I was at CVS, and there were at least three sections of refrigerated cabinet consisting of different brands of mineral water.
But if someone wants to produce hard water, I'm sure that they can do that too.
googles
https://www.amazon.com/iSpring-FA15-Water-Filter-Clear/dp/B00FBLGD1S/
Yeah. From the "related filters" section on that, looks like there's a whole industry of selling people things they can jam inline into their reverse osmosis filter system to do things to their water to make them happy. This one adds "calcium, magnesium, and potassium".
I don't see much on there by way of numbers as to what concentrations it's supposed to produce, but I suppose that if it makes people happy, it's available. Not like they're getting any guarantees as to how hard their municipal water is either.
They can buy bottled water and pay for their stupidity.
You can't remove fluoride using standard water filters, or even high-end RO filter systems. A specialized fluoride-specific filtration system (multi-stage) is required due to fluoride's chemical bond.
We need to stop letting the village idiots make policy.
We need to stop letting the conservatives make policy.
FTFY
You just repeated what OP said.
That would require a large community effort to resist occupation.
Yes we definitely need to get rid of this democracy thing /s
The problem with our current democracy is that we haven't enshrined education as a right. Democracy works great if the population is informed and has critical thinking skills. In America, any stupid idea that becomes popular enough can become the law, because the population is too stupid to make pragmatic, evidence-based decisions.
The first thing is not so much less democracy, but more participation. I'm definitely guilty of this myself, so not trying to be holier than thou preachy. Conservatives have been doing a concerted effort to take over lower level offices as well, school boards, municipal positions, etc. Part of the issue seems ro be the people who want to do this stuff often have an ulterior motive, and people who should probably be in these spots have a lack of interest.
Local office is pretty much shit. You get yelled at for whatever the crazies saw on TV last night, you can't fix anything, and everyone is angry about something.
Never doing it again.
If you want to protect democracy maybe don't defend the worst examples of it.
The christofascists are trying to destroy democracy. The village idiots are their brown shirts.
Americans won the battle to bring back measles
Now they’re fighting to bring back tooth decay
Guys doubling fisting 64oz Big Gulps won that war ages ago
Reverse osmosis filtered bottled water too
Article mentions multiple places in Canada doing the same thing. I am sure you read the article and knew that.
People can be fucking ignorant and unfortunately Covid made this all worse. There are simple measures we can take as a society to make everyone’s health better but people succumb to misinformation spread by those who profit from the alternative.
I don't think covid really made it worse, it just appeared at the right time.
The world has just gone bonkers with misinformation.
It’s only “fluoride” if it’s from the Florida region of the United States of America—otherwise it’s just a sparkling inorganic, monatomic anion of fluorine.
Common misconception - to Floridate water, a man wrestles an aligator and one of them must pee in it.
The water, or the alligator?
Not this shit again. This pseudo-scientific nonsense has been debunked numerous times already. You would think that this would be a dead conspiracy theory but here we are debating this once more. This is what happens when you have an scientifically illiterate population.
It's the old Alex Jones "turning the frogs gay" line. Just enough science to hurt yourself with.
I wanted to watch the video, but piped isn’t working. Can you help with another link, 🔗 or not, no biggie?
I went ahead and just linked it to the Youtube link. Should be working now.
On a more positive note if they lose their teeth they might have less luck at reproduction. Problem fixes itself, fingers crossed
From personal experience in dealing with people without as many teeth as the average, it doesn't stop them. R selection strategies in action.
I am missing a tooth from a face injury.
You're still above average! ;)
How? I don't know anyone my age that is missing two teeth. It isn't a big deal I have a fake one in there. Hurt like fucking hell at the time however.
Lol, mostly because I'm playing with the numbers. Kids only have 20 teeth until they're in double digits. But I was also working with a population that typically had 3-10 teeth missing, so my perspective is skewed ;)
When the tap water is "cloudy, bubbly, and milky" I think of a thousand different reasons why this could be. Flourid is not on that list.
If the tap water looks like that, I'd have the installarion checked before anything else. And I would not put it beyond an American water provider to deliver absolutely shitty water.
There are plenty of places that deliver bubbly, cloudy, milky water and it ain’t from fluoride
This sounds like that Simpsons episode where the school board votes down the "free recharging of fire extinguishers". They aren't even saying that their might be problems with floride, they just want choice for the option of choices sake. What is next, freedom to push your children into traffic?
This is a common talking point for people who can’t otherwise justify their position. It’s the “because I said so” of arguing. You see it a lot with far right talking points, where they’ll frame it as freedom of choice, when it’s really just an excuse to pander to conspiracy theorists, the extremely religious, racists, homophobes, etc…
“The civil war wasn’t about slavery; it was about states’ rights.”
“If I want to refuse service to a gay couple, that should be my choice.”
“If I want to refuse service to a mixed race couple, that should be my choice.”
For some reason, they never came around on the Pro-Choice movement, though
If I want to prevent your abortion, that should be my choice. "My" being the operative word, they're incredibly selfish. (Oh, and should the situation arise, "My abortion is the only justified abortion.")
Practically a one-to-one correlation between pro-life politicians and pregnant sex workers forced to get abortions.
But that was choices for women, who Conservatives have been clear that they view as property.
Children yearn for the streets; It has been far too long since it was commonplace for them to beg for bread, freezing in the cold, yearning for Scrooge's pocketbook.
But, but, but... states rights.
Just another pest boil of the lack of scientific education in the US. Anti-Vaxx, Anti-Flouride, Anti-Science in general. Do you guys want to go back to the age of pilgrim fathers, or what?
these people? dude they yearn for the "rural settler life" of course they want to go back to the good old, god fearing, sustenance farmers and factory workers
And tooth rot. Like dental care isn't expensive and overlooked enough.
Let them go back there, I won't stop them from being killed by preventable diseases, maimed by wild animals, and, most importantly, no phones and no internet.
o0h no, they arn't happy until EVERYONE has to live according to Pol Pot's vision (+church)
Seriously though isn't that what making everything "great again" in this country is referring to?
I mean, most western countries don't add fluoride to their water supply, as ingesting significant amounts of fluoride is bad for you. America is an outlier there, as far as I'm aware.
There's usually small amounts occurring naturally in water. However, we shouldn't be adding in more, as it's cytotoxic and were not supposed to injest it.
Western countries do add fluoride, but it's done regionally depending on natural fluoride content of local water (or, specifically, lack of it).
Ugh! This is why we can't we have nice things.
Send these idiots to 5th grade science class, and don't let them out until they pass with at least a C.
We had a fairly popular game show here called Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, and collectively, the answer is apparently "no, we're not".
But.. these people are on the school board deciding what can be taught in science class
Clearly the solution is to make fifth graders dumber 🫠
Republicans are literally trying.
JFC this again? I thought all these conspiracy wackadoos had moved on to dumber and crazier things.
Apparently not:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/opinion/alex-jones-wellness-conspiracy.html
I kinda want you to spell out what InstaHard does
God i wish my community fluoridated its water. Just had a kid, and anything to help prevent cavities is amazing, and low levels of floride is such an easy, risk free and cheap solution.
Fun fact: adding flouride to drinking water is illegal in my country and I think it has always been illegal.
We do have it in varying quantities in our drinking water but that's apparently because of our geography. We also have maximum limits like many other countries do.
People with their own water wells are more likely to have elevated levels of fluoride in their water.
Teeth....the haves vs. the haves not....another Florida experiment.
PRECIOUS
BODILY
FLUIDS!
Children's ice cream, Mandrake!
Have you ever seen a commie drink water?
Tell me Jack, when did you first develop this theory?
That movie is so fucking good.
We were satirizing this in 1964. People literally want regressivism.
They should change nothing and say that they got rid of it. It's not like these people are smart enough to tell the difference.
I had great teeth as a kid, but then moved out to the boonies with well water, 5-6 years later I started getting cavities (while still getting fluoride at the dentist twice a year). My teeth have been nothing but problems since.
Now our town water refuses to add fluoride and a bunch of my son’s school mates already have fillings in kindergarten.
My two older kids had fluoride in their city water and youngest never did. Lots cavities in that one kid
Oh good. Whats old is new again.
Flouride conspiracies are old hat compared to most of the bullshit thats been bandied about in the past 10 years.
Fun fact: spreading conspiracy theories about the evils of fluoride in the water (it's mind control! pollutes our precious bodily fluids!) was one of the talking points that crypto-fascists threw against the wall to see if it would stick- if you recall the line about your "precious bodily fluids" in Dr. Strangelove, that was a nod to that particular vein of conspiracy theory that was making the rounds in the far-loony fringes of what was then the Republican party
Are we sure these people don't just want to ban Florida but have a spelling problem?
Solid
Just fighting against the most insidious of communist plots.
Have you noticed that I only drink grain alcohol or rain water?
Solved it guys, Introducing T-dazzle, a safe fun and natural system to keep your sparklies sparkling. You can even earn discounts on your long term dental checkups by using it.
I truly do not mean to belittle anyone who holds this opinion, but isn't this such a minor thing to be worried so much about, to try to prevent?
I just mean there seems to be like a hundred other things that would be more important to discuss before we get to fluoride in the water.
No one is forcing them to drink tap water with fluoride in it. They can buy purified water if they're that afraid of it.
I bet the same people that are worried about fluoride have never had their tap water actually tested to see what their pipes might be leeching.
Or get various devices to remove it.
A water distiller is the big hammer, will take everything out.
https://www.amazon.com/VEVOR-Water-Distilling-Distillation-Countertop/dp/B0CSFQZ89V/
I believe the primary market for these devices is small-scale production of moonshine.
People don't trust "the government" to add a chemical they don't understand to their water.
You're not saying anything new to me.
My point is that this is such an old discussion to be rehashing again, and even if there's validity to the point to discuss, if you triage everything that's going wrong these days, I would say fluoride in the water is so low on the triage list.
In other words, my question was not if it's a real issue or not, but prioritizing the issue high by bringing it up again and again, throughout the decades. More important things to worry about, basically.
Agreed, it's pretty frustrating. Improved education and increased trust in governments (at least local) seem like obvious but difficult solutions.
It's the one good thing we got from Fluorine chemistry.
And they don't want it.
They're after our precious body fluids.
Have you ever seen a communist drink water, major?
Thankfully some of us are able to interpret what's going on correctly.
Loss of essence.
Stupid upcoming second Dark Ages. Things were just starting to get interesting.
Welp, does anyone need good bleeding with leaches and some infected nasty turnip that is all-natural whole food?
yall talking about fluoride? Out here we're talking about someone stealing water from us. Because apparently that's a thing that's actually genuinely happening out here.
Just don't look at the part where we're lowering the water table to irreversible levels, that's definitely not a problem, we swear.
Fluoridation is part of a communist conspiracy to sap and impurity all our bodily fluids.
Powerful men have been worried about it since the Cold War.
Great, if dramatic, video on the subject: https://piped.video/watch?v=J67wKhddWu4
I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake. But I... I do deny them my essence.
The video isn't working and your words don't make sense General Jack D. Ripper : Do you realise that fluoridation - is the most monstrously-conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face? this view was regarded as a fringe idea in the 60s
All I can think about is Dr Strangelove.
Well, they're fighting hard against that commie plot and winning.
i don't drink tap water, i don't think as many people do generally in the US as they used to 20 years ago, there's a lot of reasons for that, but it would be interesting to see how much fluoride the average person takes in from drinking water to begin with nowadays
A friend of mine used to always make fun of me for not drinking tap water. I explained that it taste bad and that you can see the particles floating around in it. He said "no no no, the Gov wouldn't allow that. It's safe to drink!" I know it is safe, but the quality sucks.
This same friend stopped drinking from the tap after he moved to the neighborhood next to mine.
All that is to say that while the tap water in most areas of the US are perfectly safe for consumption, that doesn't mean that it is pleasant tasting.
Good god! Where do you live?!
I'll grant that tap water may not taste great. This sounds stupidly picky, and I'm not, but there's a clear difference in the water from our bathroom tap, kinda gross, and the kitchen tap, totally normal. Been like that since the house was new, 7-years ago.
One thing people don't get, tap water is only nasty, if at all, when you first pour it. Take a glass and blast it full. Take a sniff, get your nose right on top.
If you let it sit for a day, it's perfectly "flat". This is why people's houseplants suffer and turn brown at the tips. The plant pushes the chemicals, like fluorine and other stuff, out to the leaf tips, turns 'em dead. Let your water sit a day and it's about like rainwater. (I know minerals like fluoride won't change or evaporate out. Don't know anything about municipal water treatment.)
And that's another thing! I've noticed for years that when it's dry, watering from the hose helps, of course. But a solid rain pops the green out. Very interesting to observe.
Lol, it sounds worse than it is. The water here is just very hard.
Not sure if it is a filtration issue or if it absorbed during transit in the pipes. At any rate, there is a very large chemical manufacturing plant and a nuclear fuels processing plant a stone's throw from where I live, so the state monitors the waterways like a hawk. They've been busted a small handful of times over the years, but thank goodness nothing serious enough to worry about- despite what some of the other locals say.
That's super interesting about the plants! Something to keep an eye on in the garden over the summer. I appreciate the tip about leaving the water out overnight too.
Apparently, boiling hard water causes certain minerals to bind with microplastics, making them way easier to filter out. So you have that going for you?
If you have shit floating in your water, you need to get that checked out because it's almost certainly an issue in your end.
I say life begins at arousal... NO FLUORIDE!
https://youtu.be/2BlJRtsQrgo?si=VggUJYscYg-x22fG
When Life imitates Art.
The best is there will be hard, medical and scientific data to absorb and see if cavities spike in these areas and compare them to past data. I might have a hypothesis of what will happen.
The article already has one example: “Juneau, Alaska, voted to remove fluoride from its drinking water in 2007. A study published in the journal BMC Oral Health in 2018 compared the dental records of children and adolescents who received dental care for decaying teeth four years before and five years after the city stopped adding fluoride to the water. Cavity-related procedures and treatment costs were significantly higher in the latter group, the study found.”
IIRC the biggest risk of the fluoride is it can pull calcium from the muscles in the digestive tract. With the tiny amount in drinking water, you would normally only feel an effect (like a slight cramp) if you drank too much, too quickly. Your body would be able to replace the calcium from its stores within a minute or two. If it is too uncomfortable, a simple antacid can speed it up.
The biggest risk is that it renders your pineal gland completely useless. (not the face, not the face, not the face)
9 out of 10 dentists approve a ban /s
“Let’s stop putting something in the water that’s meant to treat us, and give people the freedom to choose,”
Some topics demand freedom of choice and others don’t.
We need #TDazzle, it makes your teeth stronger and starts a party in your mouth. Its an aquatic based social media oral experience.
Here’s an informative video explaining the details
Was looking for this.
Removing fluoride.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL83S3zL0OE
This whole anti-fluoride thing is just a psyop brought to us by big toothpaste and the ADA… that’s the real conspiracy, wake up sheeple! /s
It’s not fluoride, it’s #tdazzle.
https://piped.video/watch?v=8c0JrJdJrBA?si=-odO3ntcUYWS0-JF