17/09/2008

Minty fresh death

So the other day I was speaking to a dental student who drunkenly claimed that a tube of fluorinated toothpaste could be fatal if consumed all at once. I was dubious, but I've been doing some research. Now I can't be bothered to go trawling through the journals, but wikipedia states that there is a recorded case of some poor bloke dying from 4g of NaF. Taking the average weight of a man to be 85kg, this works out at about 47mg NaF/kg body weight. I also found this page, which reckons a fatal dose is 5mg F/kg. However, I'm ignoring it as it looks to be one of those conspiracy sites (I mean, who calls a site the Fluoride Action Network?). As such, I can't be arsed to work out what that'd be in NaF/kg.

Now, I have in front of me 100ml of Colgate. On the ingredients, it says it's 0.32% NaF, which works out at 0.32mg. So, your 85kg chappy would have to eat 12500 tubes of Colgate to die- that's 1250 litres!

But think of the children! A newborn baby weighing 3.5kg would only have to consume 157.5mg NaF to be in trouble- that's 492 tubes. Which is still 49 litres.

Given the many reported cases of fluoride poisoning, I must have gone wrong somewhere. Any help?

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