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.
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.
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.