I appreciate the thought post. If you want to know why there are no lawsuits, stop and consider how many lawsuits against the government have you heard of that are successful, especially when the government agencies have given their stamp of approval saying something is safe, even if it isn’t.
What must be remember is the fact that-- and just a little research will show-- the corporate heads, government agency heads, politicians, are all into a revolving door of position changes. For instance, on the aspartame issue, Monsanto tried to get it approved, but their studies, as well as other studies showed it was extremely harmful. The head of Monsanto at the time was Rumsfeld.
The FDA would not approve it, even the Coca Cola company refused to use it saying it was harmful. So Monsanto funded some very unethical and inaccurate studies into saccharin, the only non sugar sweetner at the time, and “showed” it to be cancer causing-- which it was not as the study was totally flawed.
Anway, Rumsfeld left Monsanto to become head of the FDA. When he got in, he rammed through the propoganda against saccharin, and okayed apsartame. Through media propaganda against saccharin, and promotion of aspartame, companies were pretty much strong armed into using it, and now we have a generation with brain cancers and neurological problems thanks to aspartame.
Of course, the moderator and other geniuses here on this post would consider this more hack journalism-- damn the evidence.
What all these issues boil down to is following the money trail. With corporate lobbyists controlling politicians, and politicians controlling regulatory agencies, this kind of corruption has only gotten worse, and anybody that thinks Big Brother is here to protect and coddle you is in a severe state of delusion. Our founding fathers warned us not to trust government and to keep it small.
For answers to your questions, this link that I put on a previous post will provide them. It is a very well done and balanced look at the fluoride issue by a physician and university professor, despite what our chemistry BS moderator says-- by the way, physicians take as many or more chemistry classes that chemistry majors often do.
Don’t know, don’t care. As I said earlier, the source of a chemical is irrelevant to the discussion. One source of potassium nitrate, used to cure meat, is manure.
I believe you answered your own question indirectly. Successful big lawsuits hinge on real evidence; ie, the woman in the coffee lawsuit was badly burnt by the coffee. No evidence, no suit unless my lawyer is a scum working for an out-of-court settlement to shut him and me up rather than an outright, and very public, win.
Dropzone, I totally understand and appreciate that you don’t care where the fluoride in drinking water comes from. Understand that I don’t much care either, in terms of health. (I mean, I’ve been drinking it for 30-odd years, I’m either doomed or not, right?)
My curiosity derives more from the classic “Straight Dope” motivation. I just want to know, you know?
It drives me freaking bonkers that I can’t find someone to just give me a simple, checkable, yes or no answer.
But since your link was to Snopes, don’t we do aspartame in a different forum than this one? Or ar you just trying to get Chooch to discuss aspartame completely off this board?
Oooh, oooh, I wanna fight too! Just kidding, but I did register for this. Okay, so Cecil says triclosan is in Colgate Total. And Choomy or whatever, he says its gonna kill me. Okay (deep breath) when I use Colgate Total, it makes my gums, like, peel. These layers of skin lift up and get all filmy and gooey in my mouth. Only Colgate Total does this. When I mentioned it to my husband (who uses the same toothpaste as me, ha!) he said he gets it too! So I don’t use it anymore, because its gross and annoying. Does anyone else get this?? I don’t think I’m gonna die, but, geez… What do ya’ll think? Eek! Now I’m scared! I’m goin to bed…
Interesting, miss elizabeth! I am not a doctor and have no idea what is causing your problem but I have a Zen koan you might find helpful in your search for the perfect path of no cavities and no gum gunk:
A man walks into a doctor’s office and says, “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” The doctor says, “Then don’t do it.”
Oh, well, yeah. I quit using the stuff awhile back. I just thought it was weird, ya know?? I mean, does anyone else get this? I’ve never seen it mentioned. Like I said, I’m pretty sure I’m fine (my dentist hasn’t mentioned anything… but, choopy would probably say he’s part of the con anyway). I feel okay. I guess. Sometimes I get a weird stabbing pain in my neck, but I think that happened before the toothpaste. I can’t remember. Oh no! Maybe its affecting my memory too. Oh god, where’s Choopy?? I swear to Jesus, I only used that rat poison toothpaste a couple times.
So you are saying that clamshell is setting up a false dichotomy? Basically, “waste” you throw out because there is no market for it. “Byproducts” you can sell. When it was said of the Chicago stockyards that “they use every part of the pig except the squeal,” the squeal would be industrial waste. Except now PETA uses it to dissuade people from eating meat, though they don’t pay for it. Industrial economics can get complex.
Let’s just say that clamshell’s question contains some ambiguities.
I found a website for The CHINA CHENGJIANG HEQI FLUORIDE FACTORY: “Our products includes Sodium silicofluoride(capacity:600ton/month), Potassium silicofluoride, Magnesium silicofluoride, Ammonium silicofluoride, Calcium silicofluoride, Sodium fluoride, Potassium fluoride, Magnesium fluoride, Ammonium fluoride and other fluorinated salts, which all meeting the standard of state first grade product.”
I’m not aware of any factories that name themselves after their waste product, as conventionally defined.
(eyes shifting back and forth) Uh…yeah! And disposed of properlike, too, in a legal landfill with no dead bodies, neither. Not buried under a playground or ditched in a vacant lot.
The link in the source gives an air of authority, and I expected, upon clicking it, to be fed to scholarly articles detailing in what ways fluoride is more toxic than arsenic. Instead, the page is another anti-fluoride rant, and the quote found on that page isn’t the author’s either – it’s a quote that THAT author is making.
The eventual reference for this quote is:
This is very poor quote attribution, and suggests sloppy science in general.
The next quote on the page seems to contradict the first!
This suggests that fluoride is NOT more toxic than lead or arsenic.
Now keep in mind there are two separate arguments going on here.
(1) Is fluoride GOOD for you?
-and-
(2) Is fluoride BAD for you?
This page deals with the second question – whether fluoride is BAD for you, and this quote is extraneous. I (or someone else) should deal with the question of whether fluoride is GOOD for you at some other point.
I question your expertise in the field in light of the following scientific inaccuracies in your article:
You would think that an expert in chemistry would quickly see the error in this line – F is fluorine, not fluoride. For the benefit of the non-chemists who may need a refresher, fluoride is the anion of fluoride - that is, F-. Atomic fluorine, F, is a radical, and molecular fluorine, F2, is the element.
The species that is put in water is fluoride, not fluorine.
Chlorine gas was used as a chemical warfare agent in WWI. It’s a highly toxic yellow-green gas that sinks in air. Chloride (Cl-), however, is a perfectly innocuous anion which is found in table salt (sodium chloride).
So the chemical behavior of fluorine has little or no relevance to the chemical behavior of fluoride.
The question as phrased is completely ambiguous. Reactivity towards what?
There is no general “reactivity” rule in chemistry. Fluorine gas (F2) will react more violently with nucleophiles than iodine (I2), but fluoride (F-) will react more slowly with electrophiles than iodide (I-). Atomic fluorine (F) has the highest electron affinity (reaction to gain an electron), but atomic iodine has the lowest ionization potential (reaction to lose an electron).
Since organofluorides are mentionned later in the article, I’ll also take a few minutes to explain some simple organic chemistry. Organofluorides (compounds with a C-F) bond are a completely different story. C-F bonds are some of the most STABLE bonds. Of the halogens, fluoride is the LEAST reactive nucleophile, and fluoride is the WORST leaving group in SN1 and SN2 reactions. The order of reactivity for organohalides towards substitution is as follows: I > Br > Cl > F. When dealing with unreactive organohalide substrates in organic chemistry, it is a frequent strategy to do a halogen-exchange reaction to substitute the less reactive chloride with a more reactive bromide or iodide.
HF is incredibly reactive – towards glass. It’s used to etch glass because fluoride has a very strong affinity for silicon, and glass is made up of silicates. HF is used in other processes in which silicon is involved, for example the deprotection of silyl ethers in modern organic synthesis.
HF is very deadly. Because it has a high pKa, it is not fully deprotonated in pure water, and aqueous solutions of HF will contain unionized HF. HF makes its way into you bloodstream, where it is deprotonated by the buffers in blood plasma, and ionized fluoride (F-) precipitates Ca(2+) ions. This deposits CaF2 crystals all over your body in addition to quickly taking all the calcium out of your bloodstream.
But when we talk about fluoride in the drinking water, it’s already ionized – and doesn’t pass through the system in the same way that hydrogen fluoride does. So the physiological effects of hydrogen fluoride have very little relevance to the physiological effects of ingested fluoride.
In light of the science lesson above, most people should start to question how credible this site is. Fluorine has NEVER been added to drinking water, and hydrogen fluoride has never been added to drinking water.
From the linked article:
PFOS = CF3-(CF2)7-SO3H
An organofluoride compound. These classes of compounds don’t mix with either organic liquids or aqueous solutions, and, as you might expect, have very little to do with fluoride in water.
You can learn more about these solvents by Googling, “perfluorinated solvents”.
All of these, without exception, are organofluorine compounds.
As a side point, it is ironic (with respect to the author’s contention that fluorine is super-reactive), they are typically incorporated into medicines specifically because of the LOW reactivity of organofluorine compounds! One of the major problems with drugs (in general) is oxidation of aromatic rings by liver enzymes. Putting fluorine on the aromatic rings DECREASES the rate of oxidation and lengthens the compound’s half-life in the bloodstream.
Fluoride (F-) cannot be broken down into any pieces, and, having a complete octet, is immune to the effects of free radicals.
Fluorine is never added to drinking water.
And that’s it. From this point on, the article talks about:
This article has failed to present a single shred of evidence that fluoride in drinking water is hazardous to one’s health. It has relied on the common but erroneous confusion between fluorine, organofluorine compounds and fluoride anion.
Furthermore, there are so many scientific inaccuracies in this article that I seriously question the value of the author’s science degree. How can someone with 10 years of expertise in the field have so many basic misunderstandings about chemistry?
Not that I believe anyone would nitpick this point, but the common source of fluoride in toothpastes is sodium monofluorophosphate (SMFP) - in which the fluorine is bonded to phosphorous (belonging to a general class of compounds known as phosphonofluoridates).
Now, I know that sooner or later some anti-fluoride advocate will notice that phosphonofluoridates (such as sarin) are commonly used as nerve agents and will undoubtedly use that association to try and smear SMFP, to which I would respond by pointing out that phosphorous is incredibly oxophilic (loves oxygen). As soon as phosphonofluoridates are dissolved in water, the P-F bond is quickly hydrolyzed, and the corresponding phosphate (P-OH) is released (along with fluoride).
Nerve gases are designed with lipophilic groups so that they are directly absorbed through the skin – and they get into your nerves that way. Should you try and dissolve a nerve gas in water, it will quickly be destroyed.
As a matter of fact, nerve gases are generally destroyed by stirring them up in water with a little sodium hydroxide.
So, a big pre-emptive “No, sodium monofluorophosphate isn’t a potent nerve agent.”
