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Fluoride and bone cancer

"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
 
Why boys and not girls?

If it was something about testicles or other gender-specific body parts, I'd go along with the idea - but, of course, await sound scientific evidence.

But bone cancer?

I'm not ruling it out, I am merely scratching my head.
 
Perhaps boys' bone growth is different from girls'.

Normally these sort of "scientific study scares" just roll off my back, but for this one I'm having to calm myself down. We have well water, so we gave our kids fluoride pills.

~~ Paul
 
Bone cancer? Only for boys? In some places they use the word "bone" as a euphemism for *****.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Perhaps boys' bone growth is different from girls'.

Normally these sort of "scientific study scares" just roll off my back, but for this one I'm having to calm myself down. We have well water, so we gave our kids fluoride pills.

~~ Paul
Click to expand...
This scare reminds me about the alert about birth control pills. In the news it said that the pills doubled the risk for blood clots, what they didnt bother to tell is that the risk for pregnant women were ten times higher, so the birth control pill could be seen as protective against blood clots since it protected against pregnancy. I suspect that bone cancer is a rather rare disease and you have to weight an increased but still very low risk vs beneficial effects of fluoride. Why do you use fluoride pills because of the well water? just asking out of ignorance.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Perhaps boys' bone growth is different from girls'.

Normally these sort of "scientific study scares" just roll off my back, but for this one I'm having to calm myself down. We have well water, so we gave our kids fluoride pills.
Click to expand...
Oh, you were serious? Alright, sorry then.

A quick internet search shows that there are about 900 new cases of osteosarcoma in the United States per year on a teenage population of about 34 million, making the annual occurance rate about .0026%. That's in a country were about half of the population drinks fluoridized water daily. So even if the osteosarcoma rate for non-fluoride consumers is zero and the increased rate is infinite (something more than zero divided by zero) it's not like you've doomed your kids to certain death by giving them fluoride.

You've exactly nailed why osteosarcoma is more common among boys than girls -- it's associated with growth spurts and adolescent boys have more pronounced sudden growth spurts (heh) than girls. It's unclear to me whether the study controlled for that (to be fair, I can't see the second link at work).

I'd be curious to see the actual study, but for now I'd call this a classic case of scientists overstating the significance of their results and/or (more likely) a "public interest group" and the media teaming up for some scaremongering.
 
What were the doses involved in the research? It's long been known that overly high doses of fluoride cause mottling of the teeth, and even higher doses have more severe impacts. But "normal" doses do not (at least according to the materials I've seen over the past 20 years or so).
 
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