Originally Posted by 62pilot

I thought the title said Florida lowers I.Q.s.

Aspartame drops teens scores. Florida, retirees, you can figure that out without the Bureau of Stats

"We also searched the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, as many studies on fluoride neurotoxicity have been published in Chinese journals only"

This rung alarm bells with me. Chinese medicine is a joke, sometimes. Really. When I would go to the hospital, some of the crap they would want to do to me was just hilarious. Got a cough? You need an IV bag while you wait in the waiting room. Thank god my wife's relative was a US trained doctor there or I'd have never even gone in the first place. They have studies that prove that wind will go through your belly button and cool your guts so you should never expose your stomach on a windy day. They have studies saying that women shouldn't wash their hair for a month after giving birth or they could die. They will tell you how there have been so many studies that show the squat toilet is by far the most hygienic, all the while using their saliva covered chopsticks to all eat out of the same dish. It doesn't help that you can get any crap article published in medical journals there for the right price. Any study that relies on Chinese medical studies and journals is immediately dubious. They do have a good reason to have a lot of studies, though. Lots of areas in China have naturally occurring fluoridation at extremely high levels. The only people that drink that water are the poor; everyone else drinks bottled water.

Did you guys check the supplemental information? I did. All the studies came from China except 1 from Mexico and 1 from India. It may be they simply picked kids out of a village and if they had higher levels of fluoride they were labeled the fluoride kids and those that didn't were labeled "reference group". If that's the case, what if those with lower levels of fluoride had lower levels because they had wealthier parents that only had bottled water (for which there is a known correlation between IQ and prosperity). There are so many holes in their reference studies, it's a wonder they were able to draw a conclusion at all.

There isn't much debate in the western world; high fluoride levels do have a detrimental effect when found in extremely high concentrations (compared to water fluoridation). There really is no reason to fluoridate drinking water. This particular article, however, seems to be Swiss cheese.

Originally Posted by Wufnu

"We also searched the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database, as many studies on fluoride neurotoxicity have been published in Chinese journals only"

This rung alarm bells with me. Chinese medicine is a joke, sometimes. Really. When I would go to the hospital, some of the crap they would want to do to me was just hilarious. Got a cough? You need an IV bag while you wait in the waiting room. Thank god my wife's relative was a US trained doctor there or I'd have never even gone in the first place. They have studies that prove that wind will go through your belly button and cool your guts so you should never expose your stomach on a windy day. They have studies saying that women shouldn't wash their hair for a month after giving birth or they could die. They will tell you how there have been so many studies that show the squat toilet is by far the most hygienic, all the while using their saliva covered chopsticks to all eat out of the same dish. It doesn't help that you can get any crap article published in medical journals there for the right price. Any study that relies on Chinese medical studies and journals is immediately dubious. They do have a good reason to have a lot of studies, though. Lots of areas in China have naturally occurring fluoridation at extremely high levels. The only people that drink that water are the poor; everyone else drinks bottled water.

Did you guys check the supplemental information? I did. All the studies came from China except 1 from Mexico and 1 from India. It may be they simply picked kids out of a village and if they had higher levels of fluoride they were labeled the fluoride kids and those that didn't were labeled "reference group". If that's the case, what if those with lower levels of fluoride had lower levels because they had wealthier parents that only had bottled water (for which there is a known correlation between IQ and prosperity). There are so many holes in their reference studies, it's a wonder they were able to draw a conclusion at all.

There isn't much debate in the western world; high fluoride levels do have a detrimental effect when found in extremely high concentrations (compared to water fluoridation). There really is no reason to fluoridate drinking water. This particular article, however, seems to be Swiss cheese.

I don't suppose you have any connection with one of the companies that sells the Chinese industrial waste that is added to US drinking water supplies as fluoridation?

I'm sure everyone wishes I did but, no, I've never worked for any kind of chemical company in my life. My time in China was spent as a high school and college educator. Mostly, I was just surprised that an article with so much free space in the middle made it into any kind of peer reviewed journal.