Effect of Feeding Fluoroacetate to the Rat. ∗

Abstract

Summary

The tolerance to dietary fluoroacetate and its effect upon skeletal fluorine deposition in the rat has been studied. It has been shown that the rat will survive the addition of 20 ppm of fluoroacetate to the diet, that there was a period of adjustment to it during which time there was a sharp retardation in growth rate, that sufficient physiologic adjustment was made to recover normalcy, that exposure to the toxicant conditions the animals to further increases of dietary fluoroacetate with only transitory outward effects and that this conditioned physiologic tolerance was quickly lost. Further it has been shown that there was an increased storage of fluorine in the femuri when dietary fluoroacetate was fed. It appears that fluoroacetate contributed an amount of fluorine to the femuri equivalent to that contributed by the basal diet.