Revealed: How health chiefs plan to put fluoride in half our water supply to halt tooth decay

By Daniel Martin

Mail Online

Monday 4th August

Nearly half our drinking water could have fluoride added to it under a 'secret' Government plan.

Dental health chiefs want to add the chemical to 40 per cent of England's water supply to combat high levels of tooth decay.

But critics said the 'mass medication' of water without the population's consent was an invasion of their human rights.

They also accused dentists of being in denial about the dangers of fluoride, which has been linked to diseases including brittle bones and cancer.

Dental experts, however, said there is overwhelming evidence that adding fluoride to water helps reduce tooth decay, with children the biggest beneficiaries.

Fluoride, which is tasteless and odourless, occurs naturally but is also found in drinking water supplies - usually at levels too low to affect dental health.

At present, only 10 per cent of tap water has fluoride added - in the West Midlands and the North East.

Although plans to add the chemical to more of the nation's water supply were first announced by Health Secretary Alan Johnson in February, the scale of the Government's intentions has remained under wraps until now.

Read the full story.

ANH Comment

This is a very serious issue that the ANH has covered since the first days of having a website in early 2003. Click here to review the news items dedicated to mass medicating, through fluoridating the water supply, that we've covered to date.

Of particular note is the news item dated 1st November 2005, entitled Fluoridation in the UK is now illegal! Fluoridating drinking water for the prevention of tooth caries is in violation of the European Directive on Medicinal Products for Human Use, which came into force across the EU on October 30 2005. It's interesting how when the UK has a reputation for 'gold-plating' EU Directives, where its neighbours over the channel nod in the direction of Brussels and then keep on doing what they've always done, this directive seems to have slipped by unnoticed. One wonders who benefits, or should we phrase that, who profits from the illegal mass poisoining of a nation's water supply?

Certainly not the people who then have to drink the toxic waste. One small fact the proponents of fluoridation usually omit to tell you is that fluoride is added to the water supply in the form of hexofluorosilicic acid, which poses many unanswered questions in terms of risks to health. Risks to the health of infants and the unborn and linked to bone cancer, osteoporosis, crippling bone defects and dental fluorosis (white mottling of the teeth). What they also omit to tell you is that the effects are cumulative, so a few isolated exposures are ok, but what about exposure over a number of years? And what steps, if any, are being taken to protect those with a large water consumption eg athletes?

Additional comment from Robert Pocock, VOICE, Ireland

The UK government policy on extending fluoridation from 10% (W Midlands and N East) to other areas is incoherent and illogical.

Why is only 40% of the UK to be fluoridated if this is such a good policy. Why not 70% + as in Ireland which is routinely quoted as a 'success story' of fluoridation. The targeted areas are Southampton and the North West where decay rates are allegedly very high and therefore need fluoridation (ignoring other dental interventions, such as education of school children as is successfully employed in unfluoridated Scotland).

In the UK there is a disgraceful attempt to 'engineer consent' of the people living in the targeted areas without these people being aware of what is involved. People are not being told the full facts and the unelected Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) and Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) are engaged in a spurious form of public consultation to ram this policy through on an unwitting public.

The picture is complicated by the fact that the Water Companies will have to deliver this toxic chemical to customers and they are nervous of the legality of this practice especially where there has not been proper public consultation, as required by the Water Act. The consultation has been anything but proper and the water companies know that.

A further key aspect is the role of local councils. Unlike SHA's and PCTs, these are elected bodies and are responsible for approving new health initiatives such as fluoridation. There is a very active and effective group 'UK councils opposed to fluoridation' and members of UKCAF make presentations to Scrutiny Panels on local councils. To date no scrutiny panel has approved fluoridation and most have rejected it outright. The Isle of Man has recently rejected just such an underhand attempt to introduce fluoridation into the island.

It is important for everyone to realise the equally underhand methods being used in the UK to slip in this daft policy, using UK taxpayer money to do so ! (£42 million promised by Health Secretary Alan Johnson in early 2008 to promote water fluoridation).

NB: Scotland, Wales and N Ireland do not permit their drinking water to be fluoridated while here in fluoridated Eire, dental fluorosis now affects four in ten Irish teenagers. Several thousand Irish children have severer forms of fluorosis involving expensive veneering—repeated every ten years or so and often culminating in crowns—costing many thousands of pounds and this is not reimbursable on the NHS!

Could this be an explanation for the near-universal support for fluoridation from dentists in Ireland and England?

In the words of Dr Bob Carton from the US in the 1990s :

" Fluoridation is the greatest case of scientific fraud of this century, if not of all time"

Additional sources of information on campaigns against water fluoridation from:

UK Councils Opposed to Fluouridation (UKCAF) (UK)

VOICE (Ireland)

The Fluoride Action Network (US)

and the other side of the debate:

The British Fluoridation Society (UK)

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