UK Arthritis Drug Concern.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has ordered Prexige, available in the UK since December 2005, to be withdrawn from the market...amid concerns that it may cause liver damage.

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This seems to represent a very responsible attitude on the part of the MHRA. It has not waited for a definite Yes or No while risking peoples' health; the likelihood of it causing a serious health condition has been enough for the agency to exercise its function to have the drug banned completely. So what does it have to say about silicofluoride which some regional health councils have mandated as a blanket addition to their water supplies? This, without consultation; without signed consent and without regard to world-wide condemnation of the practice! It says that 'fluoride', being unlicensed, is not a medicine, therefore it is of no concern to the agency.We may ask why the agency has not seen fit to grant it a licence when is is being used overtly for a medicinal purpose - the reduction of tooth decay in minors. Possibly for fear of litigation? The 'fluoride' currently administered to 9 per cent of the population of Britain and Ireland is an untested industrial waste of which the EEC Directive on Dangerous Substances once stated: Do not let this material enter the environment; dispose of it only under controlled conditions. Containing, as it does, measurable traces of lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, silicon and two radioactive elements, it really should have no place in anything even remotely connected with public health, at whatever concentration. The graph of a 25 year Swedish survey conducted under the auspices of the World Health Organisation, plotting the general decline in tooth decay throughout European countries, shows upward/reverse trends only in those countries where fluoridation has been promoted and adopted, suggesting that fluoride actually causes dental decay instead of preventing it as is claimed. In so far as arthritis is implicated, the cause and effect of fluoride on that condition was established in 1993 by Dr Robert Carton, a risk assessment manager for the US Environmnental Protection Agency. Carton had conducted research based on the medical records of several hundred thousand post-65 white women, some of whom had been exposed to fluoride in the water. Those that had been so exposed suffered from arthritis - all of them; but those living in unfluoridated communities and states, were free of that condition. Our Government's attitude to that research; and more like it from other countries including Australia, New Zealand, China India and Japan, has been to ignore it. The MHRA is obviously content to follow that policy along with the Health & Safety Executive, the Drinking Water Inspectorate, the British Dental Association, the BMA and successive health ministers of both main political parties, The history of fluoridation has been characterised internationally by droves of distinguished 'experts' and learned bodies side-stepping their public responsibility to tell the truth.

Bernard J Seward