Southampton Daily Echo

SOAPBOX: Fluoride debate
BRAVO, Daily Echo, for your accurate, comprehensive and up-to-date report 'Kicked in the Teeth' (June 25).
You captured a change of mood that I've noticed myself recently. Feelings of dismay and disappointment are turning to anger.
With such blatant disregard for democracy, arrogance and contempt for ordinary people shown by the Government, Secretary of State for Health Andy Burnham, his sidekick Ann Keen, South Central Strategic Health Authority, other local health chiefs and all the pro-fluoride councillors, no wonder we're getting angry!
Remember the Distillers company said Thalidomide was safe? Remember the tobacco industry hid the truth for years? Even doctors told people to smoke!
England, Eire and Spain are the only countries in Europe that have fallen for the fluoride myth so slickly promoted by the phosphate fertiliser industry.
Other European countries put their best minds on to studying the evidence and banned fluoridated water. If our cruise ships fill up with fluoridated water, they will be banned from calling at some European ports.
Even pro-fluoride scientists admitted that fluoridated water harms babies and must not be fed o them. The SHA and PCT hid that fact from us during the sham consultation.
In the British Medical Journal of October 5, 2007, three eminent doctors disclosed that the Government had misrepresented the University of York's research findings, (the York Review, which the Government had commissioned) by cherry-picking the parts of their report that they wanted us to know about and omitting what they didn't want us to know, to make it look like fluoridation was safer than it probably was.
The authors of the review did not recommend water fluoridation as safe; they called for randomised controlled trials to be undertaken before spreading fluoridation further. That is the
truth. The story we keep hearing from those on high is the opposite.
That article added that the Department of Health's objectivity was "questionable", because the British Fluoridation Society, which had been set up expressly to push for fluoridation nationwide, was funded by the Department of Health. Yes, to add insult to injury, we taxpayers paid for it. No wonder we're getting blood-boilingly mad!
But rather than get downhearted we must harness that anger and fight to the end. HAF's website is at hampshireagainstfluoridation.org.
SUE ROBSON.
• Source The British Medical Journal October 5, 2007, reported in The Guardian, October 5, 2007.