Paraquat, fluoride, Southampton decision and more

Who, among the gardening fraternity, remembers Paraquat weedkiller?

We can only remember it as it is now banned from sale and use; and quite right too because it is a very poisonous chemical with no known antidote.

Occasionally, however, a case of accidental exposure makes the news where it has been foolishly decanted into an un-labelled bottle or flask and left for years on a shelf from which it may be mistakenly identified as a health or leisure drink.

Even putting the bottle to one's lips, then hastily discarding it, has led to fatal consequences.

So how would you feel about that poison, or another quite like it, listed as Class 2 under the Poisons Act 1972, being added, with the blessing of our National Health Service, to your tap water?

Don't answer that question for the moment. Consider another which has already been put thousands of people in, or around cities or regions where the public health administration, urged by the UK Department of Health, plans to introduce a water fluoridation scheme.

Q. Would you agree to have fluoride added to your drinking water so that children can have better teeth?

That, on its own, seems like a reasonable proposition but anyone ticking the YES box puts their own life and health; and that of their nearest and dearest, severely on the line. It also compromises their long-standing right to refuse medication; that or anything else the state may decide upon in the future.

The 'fluoride' (fluorine compound) to be used for that purpose H2SiF6, a fluorosilicate, stands alongside Paraquat in the poisons register. Knowing that, would you still tick the YES box? 72,000 people in Southampton recently said they wouldn't by voting NO to the fluoridation scheme proposed for their city, via a public petition prefaced by a printed declaration reliably attributed to Gordon Brown, "The people must be allowed to decide..."

Those well-informed Hampshire residents and water consumers were not allowed to decide because their health policy decision-makers, the South Central Strategic Health Authority members - all 12 of them - rode roughshod over their vote and decided for themselves that a NO answer was unacceptable; and that fluoridation just had to be good news for everyone, including, of course, the children, even highly vulnerable infants.

In the county of Cumbria, a leaked document revealed that its Director of Public Health had actually instructed his health officials to vote in favour, regardless of public opinion; a crooked 'mailed fist' strategy, hurried along by our Secretary of State for Health, Andy Burnham, who has told authorities to 'get on with it' without awaiting the outcome of public opinion surveys. Not exactly a vote winner in the democratic election stakes but Burnham's crude outburst and the irony of it has seemingly passed unnoticed.

One of the features of the fluoride legislation was that each Primary Care Trust should request a feasibility study with the water supply company. This can turn out to be a meaningless gesture because once that request has been filed, the commitment becomes obligatory; a 'done deal'. Second thoughts, like those which occurred to the PCT members at Portsmouth who decided against being tied to Southampton's scheme, fearing long term pollution of The Solent, but wished to be re-consulted, were given a frosty response by the SHA; their chairman being de-selected from office. That was his reward for exercising democratic choice; the same treatment dispensed to Southampton folk who had exercised their own brand of democratic choice.

Since then, a surprise has surfaced. Using the Freedom of Information Act, a Southampton citizen has discovered the figures given for decayed, missing and filled teeth in that city were different from those published in the consultation document. Southampton's dental health statistics fall well inside the NHS limits and that city has no need of a fluoridation scheme. Poisonous chemicals do not need to be added to its otherwise clean, uncontaminated water supply. One wonders to what kind of song sheet the SHA sings that it should insist on forcing its hand on the matter?

Concurrently, as reported in the Dursley Gazette 29.10.2009, children in South Gloucestershire have some of the healthiest teeth in the country. Let us hope that its public health director Dr Chris Payne feels disinclined to be carried along on the wave of betrayal of public opinion by applying for a feasibility study simply to stay friends with neighbouring authorities who have swallowed the Government rhetoric inherited from the USA. That is where fluoridation was launched in 1946 as a military atomic waste disposal route; a classic case of secretive fly-tipping to avoid hugely expensive neutralisation charges. Massive cancer deaths followed.

Three award-winning scientists have described fluoridation as "probably the greatest scientific fraud of the 20th century" a contention endorsed by 13 Nobel Prizewinners in chemistry, biology and toxicology. The Government - our Government, uniquely in the whole of the European Union, pretends it knows nothing of these facts and critiques and continues to violate medical ethics with its anti-democratic and crazy mission to poison us all; children being the emotive fall-guys to justify the crime.

The case for fluoridating Bristol, even if it is shown to be feasible, may be up for the most intense public scrutiny and protest, given the record of good dental health in South Gloucestershire and attempted fraud on the South Coast...

Bernard J Seward