Interesting Links for 26-09-2021

[andrewducker]

Fluoride to be added to UK drinking water to cut tooth decay, chief medical officers say (I thought we had decades ago!)

(tags:UK teeth health water )

Sandman first look trailer

(tags:trailer sandman neilgaiman )

The Predator That Makes Great White Sharks Flee in Fear (Better to run than to have your liver squeezed out)

(tags:sharks whales predator )

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

Fluoride to be added to UK drinking water to cut tooth decay, chief medical officers say (I thought we had decades ago!)

(A note that the article addresses health concerns about water fluoridation.)
There's a chart in https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/fluoridated-drinking-water/ that suggests it was so this is weird indeed.

[emceeaich]

There's at least a couple of US states which don't fluoridate drinking water, and the opposition to fluoridation sounds just like anti-vaxxer nonsense.

[ninetydegrees]

You're missing both the point of my comment and of the article. Nobody in the scientific community worth its salt is trying to argue that fluoride isn't effective for preventing cavities or that tooth decay isn't a concern. Questioning whether water fluoridation is the best solution to this issue considering there are different solutions which have proven to be as effective, and if so how water fluoridation should be regulated, and asking for more/better scientific studies about potential lesser-known side-effects that could or could not be concerns has nothing to do with anti-science nonsense. It's quite the opposite of that.

[emceeaich]

To clarify, I mean the domestic US objections to fluoridation, not the discussion in the linked article.

[ninetydegrees]

The wiki article on this topic says that only 14% of the UK gets fluoridated drinking water. The ITV article was somewhat misleading at first then but does mention that England only has "5.8 million people drinking water with added fluorine" later.

Fluoride

[alithea]

Severn Trent Water have been doing it for decades because I had fluorinated drinking water growing up. I knew it wasn't England wide but I had assumed it was reasonably widespread!

[snippy]

I grew up (mostly) in a city that did not and still doesn't fluoridate its water. I have the cavities and the fillings to prove it, in every one of my molars.

[anna_wing]

I grew up in a developing country that fluoridated its public water supply as soon as it actually had one. I hadn't realised there were developed countries apart from the US that didn't do it.