Comment by guest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guest | Hacker News Reader

No credibility to those going off grid or those slandering them. There will be idiots wanting things to be black or white with nothing in between - while it's the scale that creates the ability to differentiate right from wrong and what is what.

Fluoride has been linked as detrimental to IQ by Harvard - search and you'll find the study (and afaik not only by Harvard, one example should be enough).

Regarding tap water it will soon be the organisation of it through the state that stands between a massive "outbreak" of cancer in the population and keepign up the current rates of it. -Fracking has created holes inbetween water sources and oil/gas pockets - these are filled in by pumping down gravel and cement. That mixture to begin with isn't even as "qualitative" as you might think as pokects of other materials are created and as the layers of rock, dirth etc shifts the material is ground down. Within 30 years there is a really high risk of failure and over time the vast majority will fail - resulting in a poisioned watertable. Do you really think the people who have ownership of gas, oil and fracking companies will be held accountable by the legal system? Or by corrupt politicians - many who surely had a hand in the allowance to drill in the manner which has been done...

Tap water is the way to assure massive amounts of clean water to a population - that however does not mean that it does not come without a cost (if it is fluoride and a lowering of IQ to create a docile people or not) and that tradeoff should be known - both the positive and the negative of it.

Transparency drives technological evolution, if the tradeoff is known and can be argued to be problematic there is an incentive to come up with a better solution.

I checked this claim on Google Scholar. To my surprise, there actually appears to be some credible research linking fluoride in water to lower IQ in children. However, studies are typically in China where fluoride levels can be much higher than what is recommended in (e.g. in the US). We are also talking about roughly 0.5-1 IQ points as an average effect size, so not huge. Lastly, note that these are descriptive associations, and possible confounders include the presence of arsenic in drinking water (guess Chinese public health still has some way to go...).

Here's what seems like a reasonable meta analysis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3491930/

There is a (rather old) NRC report here, which seems like a reputable source:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=NAB43R0rTV4C

For a more recent sceptical take, see: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2013.3... with an ungated link at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.699...

Anyone in the field want to comment on the credibility of this research?

Does anyone actually drink tap in china? Even boiled a lot of middle class Chinese will still prefer bottled. Not sure how they did these studies.

In 1832, there was a cholera epidemic. Thousands of new cases each week and hundreds of deaths. When it hit Paris alone, tens of thousands of people died. To quote a former mayor of New York at the time:

> Our visitation is severe but thus far it falls much short of other places. St. Louis on the Mississippi is likely to be depopulated, and Cincinnati on the Ohio is awfully scourged.

Over a hundred thousand people fled urban areas to live in the countryside to escape cholera. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans died of the disease. Our former president, James Polk, succumbed to the disease. Almost a quarter million Mexicans died. Millions of people contracted cholera around the world and hundreds of thousands of them died.

We don't really have cholera anymore. Fewer than forty cases have been reported in the US each year for the last fifty years or so. This is largely due to our ability to treat water.

You know who doesn't have treated water? The Democratic Republic of Congo. Ever hear about the water crisis in Africa? Tens of thousands of people contract cholera there (among other other diseases) each year, and a good chunk of them die.

> Transparency drives technological evolution, if the tradeoff is known and can be argued to be problematic there is an incentive to come up with a better solution.

Drinking untreated groundwater is not the answer, and not innovative in any way. It's regressionist. Encouraging other people to do it with promises of potential health benefits is ignoring our relatively recent past, where literally millions of people died because we didn't have clean tap water. Perhaps we've lulled ourselves into a false sense of security, not having to worry about dying from terrible waterborne diseases.

Also, fluoridated water doesn't decrease your IQ [0], and claiming it does is irresponsible.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/water-fluoridation-reduces-iq/

Here's one such (meta) study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3491930/#!po=58...

Note that it focuses on child development and several of the included studies have populations which rely on water sources contaminated way beyond typical fluorodation (up to 10mg/l vs 1mg/l).

Also we're talking about a small difference in IQ (-0.5 point, still very costly in personal and societal terms); nothing about making populations docile.

NYC has been fluoridating water since the 1964. Doesn’t seem to have affected IQ or made anyone docile.

That is not a productive debate to be had. Conspiracies aside, there are clearly questions to be asked: many studies show negative effects of fluoridation such as an increased rate of fluorosis in children, over-exposure, including evidence of neurotoxicity. Even more worrying, the sources of fluoride used have been shown to be frequently contaminated by much, much worse substances due to their origin as a manufacturing by-product.

Most importantly, countries that do not fluoridate water (~95% of the world) have experienced the same reduction in tooth decay as the ones who do.

They don’t call them UK teeth for nothing. It obviously does have an effect on tooth decay, I’ve seen a lot more problems in my friends who come from non-flouride societies with similar dental hygiene to myself.

http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6543

The UK is (was) actually one of the few EU members to fluoridate their water for a slice of the population.

just last week there were stories about the crime rate in nyc hitting lows not seen since the 1950s... ;)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/nyregion/new-york-city-cr...

This is the study you are talking about --> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3491930/

"The estimated decrease in average IQ associated with fluoride exposure based on our analysis may seem small and may be within the measurement error of IQ testing."

Just out of curiosity, are you an anti-vaxxer?

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