A bill to ban the use of the mineral in public water passed the Florida House 88-27. It now awaits Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signature.
Lawmakers in Florida gave final passage to a bill to ban fluoride in public water systems Tuesday, with the state House voting 88-27.
SB 700, also known as the Florida Farm Bill, doesn’t mention the word “fluoride,” but it would effectively ban the chemical compound by preventing “the use of certain additives in a water system.” The bill awaits Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signature.
If DeSantis, a Republican, signs the bill, Florida will become the second state to ban fluoride from water supplies.
Unironcally yes, it shouldn’t take much convincing that a substance as dangerous as chlorine infamously known for being used as a chemical weapon shouldn’t be in drinking water when UV sterilization exists and is proven.
And costs orders of magnitude more.
Using chlorine to treat drinking water is fine dude, just stop.
Water is often said to be the “element of life”, and we need oxygen to live. But if you add one oxygen atom to a water molecule you end up with H2O2, or hydrogen peroxide, which is deadly.
This is the thing that the majority of people don’t understand about chemistry. Just because one chemical (water is a chemical, btw) has the same word in its name as another chemical that’s known to be highly toxic doesn’t mean they’re both toxic.
Chemistry is insanely complex and we are entirely unable to evaluate the toxicity of a chemical just by its name (without prior knowledge).
Except that chlorine is highly toxic? Unless there is some other chlorine that i am unaware of that shares the name with regular chlorine that is also used as a disinfectant without being highly toxic.
Maybe do like 5 min of research to learn how the treatment works and why it’s completely safe?
You literally just proved my point. Congrats.
Man, just wait until you hear about this awful chemical called dihydrogen monoxide. It’s used as an industrial solvent, cleaning agent, and all other kinds of destructive things, and they put it in your food! This shit can kill you if you breathe in too much, yet they put it in our food?!?!1?1
Is your argument that chlorine is as safe to consume as water?
No, just that your dAnGeRoUs ChEmIcAl assertion is FUD and spreading ignorance. But considering you ‘unironically yes’-ed a comment referencing Haiti and how the microorganisms will strengthen your immune system, I’m entirely unsurprised.
As another person put it ‘the dose is the poison’. Sure, chlorine is poisonous in large doses. But so is water.
Clearly this wasn’t the the part I was referring to… Why would you think I would suggest not disinfecting water when a sentence later I suggest using UV disinfection.
Yes you don’t die immediately if you drink chlorinated water like if you breathe chlorine gas. However if I had to choose between drinking chlorine treated water vs drinking UV treated water all my life this choice is easy to make.
If I had to choose between panicking over chlorinated water or spending billions of dollars to disinfect water in a less effective way…
I’d probably just let the water sit out for a while or run it through a cheap carbon filter because I’m not an idiot.
Ban sodium chloride too!
Is your argument that chlorine is as safe to consume as salt?
Are you claiming that chlorinated water is as dangerous as chlorine gas?
No, but i am saying i would rather not drink disinfectants.
Then enjoy waterborne diseases - apparently that’s preferable to chlorine concentrations of, at most, 4 parts per million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_germicidal_irradiation
Does your tap have a UV light in it, or do you think there’s no possibility of bacterial growth between the water processing plant and your house?
Stop being so negative. They’ve clearly given this a lot of thought. At least two to three seconds.
Yes it does
And how much did it cost?
So then why do you care?
You think chlorine is mostly known for being used as a chemical weapon? Not, you know… Swimming pools?
You’re a good example of why people make bad choices about science related public policy.
First, the poison is in the dose. There’s a big difference between inhaling concentrated chlorine gas and drinking trace quantities.
Second, how do you propose we uv sterilize the water? We’d need to do so at the plant, but also at any holding cisterns. Or were you thinking of retrofit for houses? And not all microorganisms are strongly impacted by UV. It’s tricky to find legitimate research, since the people who sell them say they work great, but what’s out there paints a different picture of efficacy.
Are you… are you drinking the pool water?
Does your local government chemically treat cisterns?
I don’t know what to say other than, maybe, poison is poison. You can dilute the dose to levels that won’t have acute affects but that doesn’t mean chemical build up or other toxicity related illnesses cannot occur.
Nope, they don’t treat the cisterns because the water has been treated at the conditioning plant. Part of the reason for treatment is because holding reservoirs pose a significant risk for contamination.
In my municipality there aren’t enough cisterns that there’s a significant risk of undetected damage, but larger cities, particularly with tall buildings, will have enough that contamination is able to go longer without detection. It’s why major cities treat their water more aggressively.
Salt is poison. It’s also a disinfectant antimicrobial. You also die unless you get a quantity of it.
Ethanol is a disinfectant poison, and so is lye/sodium hydroxide. Having a pretzel and a beer every now and then is also harmless, despite being cooked in disinfectant, topped with disinfectant, and washed down with yet another disinfectant.
You die unless you get enough water, and you die if you get too much.
Foxglove can kill you, or correct dangerous heart conditions.
Apples contain trace amounts of cyanide. Pears have formaldehyde in them because it’s part of natural biological processes. (Your body actually has special processes for handling the formaldehyde it produces. You still shouldn’t drink it, but pears are fine)
The dose makes the poison. That’s not just a phrase meaning that sometimes you can avoid toxicity, it’s quite literal. A poison is a chemical that disrupts normal bodily processes. Every chemical can do that with the correct (incorrect?) concentration.
If you choose to point to a chemical and say it shouldn’t be consumed because there’s a dose that can be harmful, it’s worth remembering that every substance has that limit.
And that’s the type of question you need to ask, not “is it poisonous at some dosage”. You might be shocked to learn that that’s actually part of what we look at when deciding if a chemical is safe to use in some context.
Also, I don’t drink the pool water because it’s a taboo in my culture to drink water that has had people in it. Doesn’t mean it’s unsafe to drink, since getting some in your mouth is inevitable when swimming. It’s treated much more aggressively because “people are in it” and communal things like that are risks for disease spread.
Kinda like why I don’t sterilize my scissors at home, but my barber does. The public health aspect is why they need a license and training that covers sanitation and the basics of skin diseases.
Also, the pool inevitably has pee in it. at a significantly higher concentration than the chlorine in drinking water, as an aside.
It doesn’t seem like anything you’ve said disputes what I’ve said. Maybe that was your intention.
Reading online, drinking water chlorinated at the level pool water is chlorinated may have some acute effects. Maybe you swallow some while swimming, sure, doesn’t mean you should pour yourself a glass.
Lead in gasoline. Asbestos in the attic. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that something seemingly harmless may have detrimental long term effects.
Im not saying that’s the case for chlorine or fluoride or any of these thing I’m just saying science is good at predicting tested outcomes, it’s not good at predicting every outcome.
I already edited it to infamously anyways thats what comes to my mind at first when i think of chlorine.
And how would i propose we do this? By living in a country that already does it. Here is the page of my local water provider:
https://www.evides.nl/uw-drinkwater/productieproces/de-zuiveringsprocessen
So on whatever way the Netherlands does it seems to work out.
Being used to this type of water when i go on vacation it really smells like im drinking swimming pool water.
Didn’t know anyone was doing it at scale. Neat.
In any case, retrofitting most municipal systems just to protect against a non-existent danger just isn’t feasible.
Looking a bit more into the process in the Netherlands, it looks like it’s not just UV light. It looks like it’s also aggressive filtration, and treatment with lye and hydrogen peroxide. Also benign, but not quite in line with the “nothing that seems toxic in the water” story.
The Netherlands also chlorinates water, just not to the degree some other countries do. The chlorine is what keeps the water safe during transport and storage after it has been sterilized.
mustard gas is not the same as chlorinated water, or even bleach and ammonia. its a different compound.
Chlorine gas was actually used in world war 1. It’s still a massive stretch to invoke that in relation to water treatment.
It’s like invoking water boarding to say we shouldn’t have a water supply.
I was not talking about Mustard gas but chlorine gas, according to wikipedia first deployed on masse during tbe Second battle of Ypres by the germans.