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