Are you sure?

Dear Dr LeFanu

I concur with you in the matter of misconception of child abuse and
the penalties following the recent case. By comparison, I don’t recall reading anything in your column about “Public Health: Ethical Issues” a recent report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, launched in London on November 13. Its deliberations gave yet another soft landing to the subject, via a case study, of the fluoridation of our water supplies. Summarised, the Nuffield view is “…yes, fluoridation does conflict with our long-held right not to be medicated by compulsion, but in the absence of evidence of harm, that right doesn’t matter.” At the meeting at Westminster, I took the opportunity of asking why it is being assumed that naturally occurring ground water fluoride; and the dangerous industrial waste being used in the artificial schemes, are, (to use the report’s exact word), ‘similar’. As I began to elaborate the rationale for my question, I was rudely shouted down from the Chair, but my question, or my attempt at it, received a round of applause. Nobody else who raised a question on the other report topics was clapped. There would seem to be a latent concern about fluoride Piloting the fluoridation element, a youthful Professor Jonathan Montgomery, Lecturer in Health Law at Southampton University and Chair of the Hampshire Primary Care Trust, managed a neat duck-out on that question. I was researching fluoridation probably before he was born and there is either a lot he doesn’t know, or he does know more than he dares to say and plays the political card of nil comment. My 6pp submission to his team was obviously ignored. On Monday morning December 10, on the Radio 4 Today programme, Dr Jeff Hardy of the British Chemistry Association was discussing with John Humphrys his concern about water contaminants. In running through a list he avoided mentioning fluorosilicates; the toxic corrosives used to fluoridate the water supplies of (currently) 9 per cent of the population of the UK and Ireland. Sir David King, Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government and, on his own insistence, independent of party policies, is currently at odds with the establishment view of badger culling. Sir David once said, (2004?) on a Radio 4 You and Yours programme, “Twenty years ago I would have supported fluoridation unreservedly, but today I’m not so sure.” May I ask, Dr LeFanu, given the massive world wide evidence against the use of fluorosilicates to treat water on the pretence that it helps children to have fewer rotten teeth, are you sure, or, like Sir David King, not so sure?

Yours sincerely

Bernard J Seward