F.A.N. Newsletter

 

On Tuesday, we circulated a video of the whole of the House of Lords short debate on the fluoridation amendments to the Health and Care Bill, held on Monday Jan 31, 2022. Today, we have pulled out 5 excerpts which we think are important.

First is the opening of Lord Reay's brilliant summary of the dangers posed by fluoride to the developing brain.

Next is Baroness Joan Walmsley's very poorly researched put-down of Reay's statement. We provided the details in our last bulletin but it is worth repeating.  She attempted to dismiss the four studies that Reay cited (Bashash, 2017, 2018; Green 2019 and Till, 2020) with a PHE report published in 2018 which only had one dismissive paragraph on IQ, which cited two supporting references that were published 3 and 4 years before any of Reay's cited studies! If any two statements epitomised the frustrations of this public debate over many decades it is these. One attempts to mobilize the science, the other dismisses the science using "authority." Power might make right in war and in parliament but it shouldn't do so in science.

The next clip features Lord Mike Storey providing a '"down to earth" strategy used in Liverpool for a decade focusing on education targeted to low-income families, which has proved very successful - as well as being much safer for their children. 

We return next to Lord Reay for his description of the Childmile program in Scotland (also mentioned by lord Storey). He asked if the British government would roll out a similar strategy in the UK as an ALTERNATIVE to fluoridation. 

Lord Earl Howe gave the government's disappointing reply to Reay's positive suggestion. He said any community could offer such a program, but what was implicit in his statement, but left unsaid, was that they could do this in ADDITION to having fluoridation forced upon them! His reply reminded me of our long (and largely successful) struggle to stop the building of municipal waste incinerators in North America. We offered a program of reuse, recycling and composting as an alternative to the dangerous practice of burning waste.. The industry's response was "integrated waste management"  meaning that - incineration and recycling could be run side by side. In other words, they completely and deliberately missed the point, we were offering our strategy as an alternative to the dangers of incineration, not as a way of improving incineration. In the same way as Lord Reay's was offering the Childsmile program as an alternative to the dangers of fluoridating the water supply. Lord Howe's response is called co-option of your opponent's ideas. Hopefully the British public will not be fooled by this tactic.

Meanwhile, we urge our British readers to use these video clips to educate their friends, colleagues, the media and local decision-makers to oppose this effort to introduce mandatory fluoridation into the UK.

Jay Sanders, our Education and Outreach Director--who isolated and edited these videos for us--has also created a YouTube playlist so you can share them all using a single link: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEmxCN7TG9j2sm9LtvhVdn9EI-r5bcbQ7

Paul Connett, PhD
Director
Fluoride Action Network