Letter to Bristol press

Safe Water Campaign member writes to Bristol press:

As a former lecturer, having contributed to the practice of "handing on the inherited culture" or, as one of my cynical colleagues once put it, "casting artificial pearls before real swine", may I offer congratulations to the pupils and their teachers in the Bristol and Avon area who are turning former despair into triumph with respect to the Sats tests.

Let us hope this encouraging trend will continue upwards but on a long term perspective there could be a cloud on the horizon.

Should Bristol, South Gloucestershire; and Bath and North East Somerset fall victims to water fluoridation schemes, on evidence from the Peoples Republic of China there will be a depression of I Q scores among the young. Not only is the fluoridating agent a neurotoxin, but its one acknowledged visual outcome is dental fluorosis, an ugly, socially repulsive condition of the teeth, regardless of whether they are more decay resistant.

It was the degree of fluorosis that was found to tally with the I Q scores which alerted the Chinese health and education authorities, and caused all fluoridation schemes to be shut down permanently. No compromises there in the race to dominate the global knowledge economy.

The 2000 UK Government study, 'The York Review' found fluorosis to affect 42 per cent of consumers, 12 per cent really seriously. This would translate in Bristol alone to something approaching five and a half thousand children of school age disadvantaged both by appearance and inhibited intellectual skills.

Can we afford to allow this to happen when the claimed 'benefit' projected for our neighbours in Hampshire, also threatened at this time in spite (real bureaucratic spite) of a massive public NO vote, amounts to no more than 0.6 of a tooth per child per year?

Bernard J Seward