Public consultation is a sop to democracy

Letter sent to Daily Telegraph:

With reference to a possible public consultation for the Bristol and Avon area on the contentious question of fluoridation, our democratically-elected councillors and MPs should be aware of recent news from anti-fluoridation campaigners in Cumbria. Their public health director has instructed members of the Primary Care Trust to vote in favour of having fluoride.

If this policy is par for the course, dictated from the Department of Health, it looks as though Gordon Brown has dusted off his 'clunking fist' and passd it over to Health Secretary Alan Johnson.

Any public consultation on this issue will be nothing more than an expensive empty gesture; a sop to democracy, delivered by a bureaucratic fascist government predisposed to poison our water supplies, nationwide.

Does anybody recall hearing about this in an election manifesto?

Bernard J Seward

Dentist calls on health professionals to look at research

Here is a comment left on Safe Water Campaign member Philip booth's blog Ruscombe Green from a dentist - video is worth a look:

As a Dentist for 31 years, I promoted fluoridation for the first 25 and was convinced fluoridation was effective. Looking once again at the evidence was like a knee in the gut.
Fluoridation/fluoride supplements do not show effectiveness in lower decay or lower dental expenses in fluoridated communities. We are ingesting too much fluoride and the medical risks are lethal for some (osteosarcoma, diabetes, cancer, mental retardation, etc.).

Consider mother's milk. Contains 0.004 ppm fluoride. 250 times less than fluoridated water used to make infant forumal. Is nature flawed? Is mother's milk flawed. CDC and ADA recommend infant formula not be made with fluoridated water. How do you medicate everyone in water and expect infants not to be over-medicated?

15 mg of fluoride is considered lethal for some children and 5 mg/Kg of fluoride is considered lethal. The most lax state laws I've seen define a poison as a substance as a poison if it causes death at 50 mg/Kg or less. By state laws, fluoride is a poison.

Poisons can be prescribed as legend drugs if they are FDA approved. Fluoride supplements for ingestion have never been approved by the FDA.

Read your toothpaste tube. Drug Facts: (variable wording) use a pea size, if more than used for brushing is swallowed, contact the poison control center.

The question begs, how much fluoride is in a pea size of toothpaste which the FDA is so concerned about? 1/4 mg. I was shocked. 1/4 mg is the same amount of fluoride as found in one glass of fluoridated water. And the fluoride in fluoridated water is an industrial waste product with toxins in it, not pharmaceutical grade.

Fluoridation is one of public health's 10 greatest blunders of the 20th Century.m

Doe v Rumsfield 2005 the court ruled even in time of war a person cannot be medicated against their will with a drug which has not been approved for the purpose it is being given.

Fluoride has never been approved by the FDA and fluoridation has not been approved to dispense the drug/poison/substance.

For more, look at my short video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ys9q1cvKGk and also
www.fluoridealert.org and www.secondlook.org

Fluoridation has been rejected by most countries of the world based on lack of benefit, toxicology and ethics.

So what was I seeing for 25 years when I was so convinced the teeth looked hard with less decay in fluoridated areas? Actually I was seeing more the effect of socioeconomics than fluoride. Increase wealth and we increase health. Just so happened the weathy people were getting the fluoridation.

You might also like reading my editorial in "Fluoride". http://www.fluorideresearch.org/404/files/FJ2007_v40_n4_p214-221.pdf

Especially note the early concern on increased complete cusp fractures in fluoridated areas. Harder teeth=more fractures?

Much more could be said. Keep your eyes open. Bill Osmunson DDS,MPH

Where does fluoride come from?

Another letter from a member to press:

The recent Irish contaminated animal-feed scandal found the dioxin – polychloride-biphenol - 200 times above the Food Standards Agency limit, in some Irish beef and pork products with these being whipped off the shelves in an instant. This may seem dramatic, but a teaspoon of neat hexafluorosilicic acid (added fluoride) would probably finish you off in under an hour. Try accumulating the same amount in your kidneys over several decades, along with the expected general health problems in the meantime.

Many folk in the Black Country and beyond have already been going through this process for twenty years or more because for every million particles of water there is at least one particle of this cumulative toxin issuing from the taps. That is the central fact behind water fluoridation. Young children and their dental welfare are smokescreens for an evil strategy which doesn’t address dental inequalities at all but can actually make teeth brittle, pitted, and off-colour, along with a raft of orthopaedic problems. Why no concern at the top for this?

The Scottish Executive has slammed the door firmly shut against tap water fluoridation - achieving better dental heath for Scottish children via their education system. Not so for England. We have a Health Secretary spending £42million on hard-selling communities what several internationally celebrated scientists, including Nobel Prizewinners, have called ‘the greatest scientific fraud of the (20th) century’. Even the Food & Drug Administration in the U.S.A. has stated that babies should not consume fluoridated tap-water or anything made with it.

What will it take to reveal fluoridation to be an extension of its true origin?

In post war U.S.A it was the outcome of a waste disposal experiment to get the Defense Department off the hook in its quest to find an economic method of disposing of a non-biodegradable, toxic, corrosive and radioactive waste.

Then it was Uranium enrichment waste, followed by Aluminium smelter waste; now it is Fertiliser manufacturing waste. The principal is the same; the risks to heath are the same; the publicly-funded fraud is the same.

Bernard J Seward (Bristol) and John Wilkes, (Staffordshire)

Stop misleading us on fluoride

Publish Post

Here is another letter to local press:

To those dental experts who continue to insist that 'fluoride' is not hazardous to human health because it is already in the water; the extra addition being only a means of bringing the level up to what is called an 'optimal' for inhibiting youngsters' tooth decay. I would say 'Wake up and stop misleading us..!"

If you persist, then please show us where, in nature, we will find phosphate rock being continuously eroded and dissolved in concentrated Sulphuric acid. This is precisely the industrial process by which those raw materials act to produce phosphate fertiliser, the fumes given off by the reaction, if liberated by accident, constitute a Hazardous Health Hazard.

This is what Ms Rebecca Hanmer, a spokesperson for the US Environmental Protection Agency had to say about it: "Recoving fluorosilicic acid as scrubber liquor from fertiliser effluent provides a solution to two long-standing problems; Air pollution is avoided and utilities have a low-cost source of fluoride available to treat the communities."

Dr William J Hirzy, a US senior professor of dentistry had this to say about her statement: "In the air, its a hazard; In the lakes its a hazard; in the river its a hazard, but in our drinking water, its a dental health benefit. That's amazing."

What I find amazing is the way in which that and numerous other negative quotations from eminently qualified dentists, physicians, scientists, lawyers and high court judges have been virtually ignored by the British medical establishment in its stubbornly ridiculous claim that 'fluoridation is safe, proven and effective.'

We might add, "Not because it is, but because we say it is. Trust us; we're the experts."

Bernard J Seward

Letter in Evening Post

Letter published in Evening Post from one of our members:

On the same day you published my letter on the anomaly of unregulated fluoride dosing through our water supply, being proposed by Dr Hugh Annett, our local Director of Public Health, I received a document inviting me to take part in a GP Patient Survey.

It requests me, via a box-ticking exercise, to give my views on a number of issues of common interest in personal health care. Starting with ease of access to surgeries and health centres, appointments procedures and choice of practitioner, it asks about my experience of confidentiality, standard of care received and even really pointed questions of confidence and trust.

Then there are questions about my satisfaction (or otherwise) of plans for the management of personal health problems, including a list of actual or potential serious health conditions. Also included are terms like ‘discussion’ and ‘agreement’; and more about home care and access to it.

It is a classic feedback exercise to which I am pleased to have been invited to contribute, but which stands quite apart from the one aspect of remedial health for which patient feedback is not being sought, encouraged, or even permitted. That is the claimed benefit of better dental health via us all, without exception, having an additional fluorine compound in the most basic of life’s necessities, our tap water.

Irrespective of whether or not there is any health advantage in us having it, the principle of mass medication via a no-alternative, no-choice route of treatment, especially where no individual need exists or is diagnosed, runs contrary to all the care and concern elements of health maintenance professed to be the target of this apparently honestly conceived patient survey.

In the regrettable absence of any facility for personal comment, I would nonetheless feel inclined to write:

No medication without individual consultation, thank you!

This hitherto universal right enjoyed by patients is under threat from the Government for reasons which it clearly has intended to keep under wraps.

Better dental care for children is a smokescreen for something else, revealed by international evidence which is being systematically ignored. No other country in Europe fluoridates its water supplies. Why are we still promoting it?

Bernard J Seward

Wallace, Gromit and fluoride

Letter to Evening Post:

If Wallace and Gromit are being 'persuaded' to focus their communication skills towards home energy-saving techniques, why not enlist the pair's services to help combat childrens' tooth decay?

Instead of tipping poisonous fluorosilicate chemicals into our naturally fluoridated water on the pretext of improving the figures for decayed, missing and filled teeth (dmft), the responsibility for dental health can be handed back to the families of the children said to be at risk.

After all, as I once told a meeting of the former Bristol Community Health Council:

The primary responsibility for my own health rests with me. My second line of defence is an opinion from my GP or other specialist. The manager of Bristol's waterworks comes a very poor third.

Fluoridation, at a stroke, deprives me (and all of us) of the freedom of choice we currently enjoy in health matters, while setting a dangerous precedent for further interference with our rights. This is something about which we all need to think seriously, when we are offered an opportunity to take part in a public consultation.

The Director of Public Health for Bristol, Dr Hugh Annetts; and his counterpart for South Gloucestershire, Dr Chris Payne would do well to get together in helping us to see a clearer path to the critically important decision upon which so much of our future health prospect depends. The outcomes of fluoride are by no means confined to teeth and all of them, I am sorry to say, are negative effects; and terminal in many cases.

We need to see a published risk assessment, but to the best of my knowledge, forged via forty or more years of personal research, no such assessment exists; not yet, despite a history of fluoride dosing of the people of the West Midlands and the North East since 1964.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but could this information deficit explain why the Medicines Control Agency, the Environment Agency , the Health & Safety Executive, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence all decline to comment? What is frightening them, apart, that is, from the diabolical chemical origins of the fluoridating agent which eats through glass, steel, copper, aluminium and concrete?

It frightens me, but I'm sure Wallace and Gromit, once they put their minds to it , and with aid of a plate of cheese sandwiches, will get it sorted.

Bernard J Seward
Member Avon Glos & Wilts Safe Water Campaign

Another letter to Daily Telegraph

A personal view in a letter to The Telegraph:

The publicly-funded British Fluoridation Society which seems to be the force behind a renewed drive to get more communities fluoridated needs to be challenged on a few fundamentals. In the Southampton consultation, cited by Julian Lewis MP, the statement that the water already contains some fluoride is probably true, but we are seldom told what kind of fluoride it is.

Where it does occur, it is universally Calcium fluoride at an average UK concentration of plus or minus 0.2ppm The average reader would then see the claim that ..."we are going add a liitle more..." as 'more of the same'. Nothing could be further from the truth. The complex 'cocktail' is di-Sodium fluorosilicate H2SiF6, a waste product of the fertilizer industry. Thus, 'fluoride' is the accepted colloquial term to all but those who have researched the subject for themselves. It is more poisonous than lead but BFS members would dismiss this as nonsense because, as so may of them have claimed, the 'optimally adjusted' level of 1.0ppm is 'just a tiny amount'; not a very scientific expression.

In the wake of a pre-Christmas recall of thousands of lead-painted toys imported from China, the World Health Organisation has riterated its standard for the maxima for lead in the environment as 0.02ppm Dividing 1.0 by 0.02 suggests that the Department of Health is quite comfortable with the notion of us all having a toxin of fifty times the maxima specified by the WHO through our taps, insisting it is safe, but with unlimited indemnities being granted to the water suppliers against claims of harm by consumers.

All other considerations apart, this does rather look as though the millions spent removing lead from motor fuel was an irrelevant waste of time and resources.

Bernard J Seward