Another fictitious claim made by anti-fluoride advocates attempts to confuse the audience about dose. Merilyn Haines, in a recent interview even went as far as to wrongly claim that health experts do not understand dosage at all!
The easiest way to understand the truth in this situation is to use a familiar substitute; paracetamol. If you had a sprained ankle and were using paracetamol for pain relief, would it be more dangerous to take 10 standard tablets right now or two every four hours over a day?
Clearly having them all at once is a higher dose and more likely to cause you harm than small amounts over a longer period. Yet this is were the anti-fluoride advocate attempts to confuse the listener; they completely ignoring the time factor.
If I were to have one milligram of fluoride over the course of an hour or two (drinking a litre of water) and do so two more times over the course of a day, this is not the same as have three milligrams of fluoride on a teaspoon right now, or to do so and again two more times over a day.
No health expert rejects that at high doses fluoride will have negative impact. Chlorine in high doses is dangerous, but in small amounts in our water it radically reduces the potential spread of disease from drinking water – something that led many generations over history to have their children go straight from the breast to beer!
In fact, everything at high enough doses can have negative health impacts. The literature – generally the only literature anti-fluoride advocates will list – has studied the potential impacts at higher levels of fluoride exposure. As the information within the NewAnthro anti-fluoride debunking list illustrates, these higher levels are not what occurs in fluoridated areas, as supported by the various health organisations, but typically the result of industrial and environmental sources in developing countries.
In the US, the recommended drinking water concentration has been lowered from a range of 0.7 – 1.2 to 0.7ppm in the acknowledgement of other sources of intake, such as toothpaste and in some foods and drinks, which has increased over time.
This is entirely an example of expert understanding of dosage.
Fluoridation of drinking water to WHO standards is proven to be safe and effective and clearly the result of health experts research and evaluation of public health and dose exposure which is adjusted over time based on quality data.
newanthropocene.wordpress.com 