FAN Bulletin #521:

March 12, 2006.

Dear All,

In the article below we are told that Colonel Arnold, the Mid-Western Regional Council Administrator, for New South Wales ruled that “the potential benefits  (of fluoridation) outweighed the objections raised by fluoride opponents.”

Did he indeed? Does the Colonel have a medical degree? Did he read the scientific literature himself or did he rely on second hand information? Did he convince himself that fluoride at or near levels people are getting in fluoridated communities will not cause any impacts on the bone, the brain, the pineal gland, the thyroid gland, the reproductive system, or the chromosomes? Did he have good reason to ignore the Harvard PhD thesis - now acepted for publication - that there is relationship between young boys drinking fluoridated water and an increased risk of osteosarcoma, a rare but frequently fatal bone cancer? Did he realize all this without the benefit of any studies on these matters in Australia? Was he so confident of his own analysis that he felt it wasn’t necessary to wait for completion of a three year review of the toxicology of fluoride in water, which is being carried out by the National Research Council in the US? In short, did the Colonel exercise due diligence in this matter?

It will fascinate historians - if not the citizens of Mudgee who have seen their democracy disappear - that this Colonel was able to do to a whole community what an individual doctor is not allowed to do to an individual patient, i.e. force them to take a medication without their informed consent - and at a level (1ppm), which is over 100 times the levels in mothers’ milk.

But as a military person I am sure Colonel Arnold, as well as obeying orders,  is accustomed to accepting the responsibility (i.e. legal liabiity) for his actions. Hopefully, someone in Mudgee will test the extent of the Colonel’s knowledge of these matters in court, if not now, when the first symptoms appear.

If you wish to write a letter to the Mudgee Guardian, where this article appeared, their email address is http://mudgee.yourguide.com.au/addopinion.asp?class=your%20say&link_story=465318

Paul Connett

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Fluoride a costly reversal

By EDWARD K. DeLONG

Monday, 13 March 2006

Opponents of the fluoridation of Mudgee’s water have expressed hopes that councillors to be elected on March 25 might reverse a decision by Mid-Western Regional Council Administrator Col Arnold to put fluoride in the Mudgee and Gulgong water supplies.

Council’s manager water supply and waste, Carl Peterson, said while in theory the new councillors could vote to reverse the approval of fluoridation, such a step would face major hurdles including the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funds.

“It’s not impossible,” Mr Peterson told the Mudgee Guardian this week. “Council can vote to do almost anything.

“But it will be very difficult for them, and they will find there are some major disincentives.”

Mr Peterson said the major obstacles are that the NSW Department of Health gazetted the approval of fluoridation for Mudgee and Gulgong in September 2005, requiring work to commence by August 2006, and that design work is completed and construction contracts are to be let soon by the Department of Commerce within.

“If council wishes to reverse gazettal, it will have to provide compelling new evidence to NSW Health,” Mr Peterson said. “They would have to convince the NSW Department of Health that the original approval was flawed.”

Financially, he said, council would have to face the fact that costs and commitments for the project to date amount to approximately $250,000.

While NSW Health is paying these costs in full as part of its push to get fluoridation placed in municipal water supplies state-wide, that State funding would be lost if the project was cancelled.

Mr Arnold’s decision to proceed with fluoridation for Mudgee and Gulgong followed a lengthy debate, including public hearings called by private citizens and by council. Mr Arnold ruled that the potential benefits outweighed the objections raised by fluoride opponents.

The water supply for Rylstone and Kandos has been fluoridated since the 1970s.