I’m asking so I’m more prepared if this comes up in the future, it isn’t something I need at the moment.
If a child eats toothpaste and ingests fluoride, from what I’m reading online you are supposed to contact poison control and give them milk. The calcium will bind to the fluoride and neutralize it. Poison control will tell you whether it can be treated at home or needs hospital treatment.
What about giving a child antacids instead of milk? Is there any risk of that? What happens if you give them way too many antacids just to be safe?
I believe an 8oz tube of toothpaste contains about 200mg of Fluoride in it. In that case, is something as little as 4oz of milk which has 150mg of Calcium (and each Ca ion should bind 2 F ions) be more than enough to bind the fluoride?
Can magnesium be used in a pinch? If you have magnesium citrate but not fluoride, can that be used to bind the fluoride? I don’t know if that situation would ever come up, but am curious.
I’ve read somewhere that it’s rather hard to get in trouble from fluoride toothpaste poisoning anyway, because if you eat much toothpaste, you’ll start puking it up before you get enough to get F-poisoned.
I’m not sure the milk will work in the way you expect, as the calcium in milk is bound to casein in micelles. That is, it’s ordinary reactivity is hindered. The main reason for giving milk may just be to alleviate acidosis, since the principal consequence of F- poisoning is gastric irritation due to the formation of HF from F-. The milk may just raise the pH a bit and give relief.
The really bad effects of F- occur when it gets into the blood, and does indeed bind Ca+2, which can lead to cardiac arhythmias, among other things. You can really only treat this in the hospital by trying to keep the electrolytes right with IV administration of the missing ions.
I would actually try the antacid (CaCO3) first, because it’s a two-fer: you combat the acidosis with the CO3-2, and the Ca+2 released is far more available for binding F- than that in milk. It’s difficult to give too much CaCO3, so I wouldn’t worry a lot about that.
It’s to be noted that there is no sound evidence that administration of CaCO3, or milk, or CaCl2, has any especially helpful effect:
But you might as well try, if your kid has eaten a whole tube of toothpaste or something. The fluoride in most toothpaste has low solubility and availability anyway, so it’s probably hard to really hurt yourself. According to eMedicine, F- toxicity is much more associated with eating insecticides or rodenticides than toothpaste.
what Senegold said. Very hard to keep that much toothpaste down.
IIRC from dental school about 5 to 10g to be toxic to adults. Kids of course can be done in by less. Even if you figure about 1g for a kid they probably wouldn’t get it from one tube.
I recall a case here in Texas maybe 30 years ago. A young child in a dental office was left unsupervised with flouride trays in. Swollowed abunch hat kidney failure and died. Our office doesn’t use trays, we use brush on topical foam for kids. Also we don’t put fluoride on teeth if the child can’t spit.