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

IQ scores plummet in Fluoridated China.

Ed Balls' wife, Housing Minister Yvette Cooper, is among those MPs passionately committed to drinking water fluoridation as a dental health benefit for young children and I doubt very much that her husband would dare to disagree. However, having launched his "Children's Plan" with the aim of making Britain the best country in the world for children, with the expectation of 'world class' schooling as part of the concept, he really ought to look eastwards - to China. The Chinese authorities, having noted an indisputable and significant reduction in IQ scores among young people living in state-fluoridated regions, have stopped all their fluoride water treatment schemes stone dead. Compromising Chinese children's intelligence in exchange for a few less rotten teeth is not an option in the competitive global knowledge economy. Neither should it be for the UK despite our government's ambitions to the contrary.
Bernard Seward
Safe Water Campaign

Food and flavour preferences

To: Daily Telegraph
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007

It occurs to me that scientist Julie Mennell of the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia may just have heard of the research carried out by Dr Phyllis Mullenix in Massachusetts and published in 1995. Finding a flavour transmission factor between mothers to be and their unborn children is not so far removed from the effects of the ingestion of artificially fluoridated drinking water. It had been assumed by Dr Mullenix that fluoride would not cross the blood/brain barrier but she discovered, much to her surprise, that it did so; and that it predicted disturbed behaviour, a low IQ and ADHD, both irreversible in the born infant. The Mullenix research should have sounded a warning across the United States and elsewhere, but far from being acclaimed for her discovery, she was virtually sacked from her senior post at the Forsyth Institute for Clinical Studies because nothing was allowed to conflict with the long-held unsubstantiated proposition that fluoride, administered in the cause of better dental health among children, was safe, proven and effective. Bernard J Seward
Member : Safe Water Campaign : National Pure Water Association

Fluoridation - "It delivers results every time"

Dear Editor,

I wholeheartedly agree with Julian English {Editorial Comment 15.11.2007] that fluoridation of water supplies delivers results every time! Quoting evidence from the York Review {the definitive treatise for Government bodies} fluoridation delivers 48% dental fluorosis, 12.5% of serious aesthetic concern, which would require cosmetic dentistry to remedy, (probably at considerable cost to the sufferers family}. The York Review suggested an overall benefit to the incidence of dental caries of 15% but admitted that the evidence was unreliable and that higher quality studies should be undertaken. There is also emerging evidence in the U.S. that in fluoridated areas there is an increased incidence of osteosarcoma {bone cancer} in teenage boys which has a 50% mortality in the first five years. The “delivery” might also include brittle bones, thyroid damage et alia!! Mr. English makes a comparison with flu’ jabs, mass inoculation and smoking bans but omits to notice that thinking people have a free choice in those matters!! I would also like to refer Mr. English to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics “Public Health- ethical issues”, published 13.11.07 ISBN 978-1-904384-17-5, in which the benefits and harms of fluoridation are considered in a very balanced way. The study publishes a graph which shows the decrease in dental caries in 14 European countries between 1965 and 2003 for 12 year olds. Each country shows a marked decrease. The only countries with fluoride are Spain 3%, Portugal 1%, U.K.9%, Ireland 74%. In the U.K. between 1973 and 2003 there has been a decrease in decayed, missing or filled teeth from 5 to 1 in this age group. The study advises that given the general improvement in children`s teeth the possible harm caused by fluoridation, the low quality of research and the alternative methods available for delivering fluoride to those who want it, at best a “precautionary approach” should be taken on any further fluoridation of our water supplies. I would therefore like to suggest that the “anti- fluoridation “lobby, far from being “silenced” is alive and well and being supported in its aims by the academics of today.

Yours Sincerely,Rob Mehta