FAN Bulletin 817
June 23, 2007
Dear All,
Before we get to Winston, please check out the article “The Fluoride Factor” by Kelly Hearn in the Whole Life Times at
A few days ago the British Dental Foundation (a pro-fluoridation lobby) circulated a press release spouting the usual (unreferenced) hyperbole on the benefits of fluoridation. The Manchester Evening News (Manchester is one of the UK cities targeted for fluoridation) dutifully picked up the press release, without comment and without seeking rebuttal from citizens or scientists opposed to fluoridation.
However, this little piece of propaganda has had celestial repercussions. Winston Smith has stepped out of the pages of George Orwell’s 1984, and addressed some of the doublespeak used by Dr. Nigel Carter, the executive director of the foundation. Below I have printed the BDF press release as it appears in the Manchester Evening News and then Winston Smith’s response. Enjoy!
Paul Connett
Please keep checking our home page http://www.FluorideAction.net for all the other fluoride news (click on Latest News on the left hand column) and for the list of fluoride videos which can be watched on Google video. The Bryson interview “The Fluoride Deception” has now been watched by 43,238 people.
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1) Dr. Nigel Carter’s doublespeak in the Manchester Evening News.
FLUORIDE HELPS
RESEARCH shows that children living in areas where the water supplies are fluoridated were 15 per cent more likely to be free from tooth decay than those children in areas without added fluoride.
However, while talks are underway to introduce new water fluoridation schemes across the country, a recent survey shows that many people don’t know what fluoride is.
The British Dental Health Foundation found that 13 per cent of those questioned believed fluoride was a mint flavor; 12 per cent thought it was a whitening product and 15 per cent said it was a marketing gimmick.
Dr Nigel Carter, chief executive of the foundation says: “It is a big concern that people know so little about fluoride - especially when strategic health authorities are starting consultations on new water fluoridation schemes.
“The foundation is in strong support of the fluoridation of public drinking water supplies to improve oral health and there have been a number of high-level scientific reviews that support our position.
“Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral that is present in all water. It works by strengthening the enamel as it forms, making it more resistant to decay. It is the foundation’s strong belief that adding fluoride to the water supply is the best and most cost-effective way of achieving a major improvement in oral health in this country.”
The research also found that 28 per cent of people thought that their water supply was fluoridated - more than twice the true figure of 11 per cent. More than 40 per cent admitted they had no idea whether their water supply was fluoridated.
2. Winston Smith responds: ‘Time to answer some F Questions, Nigel!
An Open Letter to Dr. Nigel Carter, of the British Dental Health Foundation, on water fluoridation
18th June 2007
Dear Dr Carter,
I read in the Manchester Evening News the other day that, in a recent survey, the British Dental Health Foundation, of which you are Chief Executive, was horrified to discover that many people don’t know what fluoride is. Checking your own Foundation’s website, it seems that this came directly from your Foundation’s own Press Release, taken up by (or maybe sent to?) the Press Association. Great piece of advertising, Nigel, but I do hope that you have thought this thing through, choosing to spread your propaganda to the public like that?
Whilst many people are indeed very poorly informed about fluoride, I have to say that this is to quite a bit down to you, Nigel, but I am particularly saddened to see that unfortunately this ignorance appears to extend to the Foundation itself! Where did you find that little nugget of pure hogwash - “Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral that is present in all water.”
Natural is not the same as safe.
Well, no, Nigel, let’s be quite clear about this – it’s not. Just because some waters contain appreciable amounts of – gosh! - ‘natural’ fluoride, that’s no guarantee that it’s actually safe. There are thousands of wells in Bangladesh and India that contain water with absolutely, guaranteed 100%, natural arsenic – and people are dying like flies as a result. I know – I’ve worked there with them.
It’s a fundamental truth of toxicology that ‘natural’ is not the same as safe, so let’s not mislead people into thinking, “Ah – natural, so that’s all right then!” We don’t need fluoride - there is no such condition as ‘fluoride deficiency’. But have you ever told the public that in fact it is perfectly possible to live a long and healthy life, and even have superb teeth, with absolutely no trace of fluoride in your body? No, I thought not.
Why not tell folk here in Britain to avoid this supposed wonder drug Fluoride that you and your Foundation are so keen to push - just keep off the sugar and clean their teeth regularly? Isn’t that the sort of advice that your ‘Dental Health Foundation’ should really be doing?
A short lesson in basic chemistry.
I really am surprised at your ignorance about basic chemistry, Nigel. This ‘natural’ fluoride that you incorrectly claim to be present in all water is calcium fluoride. It’s almost insoluble, but if it does get into water supplies in any physiologically relevant amount, it is far from healthy. Ask the Chinese and Indian Governments about the crippling disease of fluorosis, caused directly by ‘natural’ fluoride in their drinking water, a disease that affects millions of people in their countries. Do you suppose they consider it acceptable to tolerate the quite dramatic damage that it is causing to their children’s intellectual abilities, as well as the accompanying damage to their teeth? Or ask the fluoridated Irish what the 48% of them with the ‘purely cosmetic’ dental fluorosis think about having teeth that could shatter because fluoride has indeed hardened their enamel - but hidden their rotten cores.
The fact is, Nigel, that the chemical that is put into the public water supplies to not some benevolent ‘natural’ substance at all, as many dentists appear to believe, is it? It’s actually hexafluorosilicic acid – a viciously poisonous industrial by-product that is so damned dangerous that it cannot be discharged directly into the environment. Have you ever mentioned the Dutch Navigator’ incident at Avonmouth Docks in 2001, Nigel – the one where there was a slight leak from a container of this chemical in the hold of the ship? That was the time that the entire port had to be closed down for 30 hours whilst the emergency services made the place safe, and the whole thing was hushed up, dismissed as a trivial incident.
Yet fluoridating the water supplies throughout the Northwest, as you seem to think would be a Good Thing, would quietly dump around ten tonnes – that’s half a tanker load, Nigel - of this stuff straight into our rivers every day of the year. So have you asked the Environment Agency to carry out a full Environmental Impact Assessment of your recommendation?
No, again, I thought not.
Fluoridation is a brilliant hoax, Nigel!
I’m really sorry to see that that you have been suckered on this crazy scheme, Nigel. It’s just about the biggest chemical scam ever! Look - it would normally cost the producers of this horrendous chemical millions of pounds a year to get rid of their highly toxic waste product in high-security hazardous waste disposal plants. But half a century ago a brilliant but deranged American spin-doctor came up with an astounding wheeze – water fluoridation. Instead of dumping the stuff, why not sell it to water companies, so that people could be hoodwinked – or now, in Brave New Britain, forced - into drinking it?
And here’s the other really fiendishly clever thing about this scam - 99% of this stuff doesn’t actually get drunk, but goes straight down the drains to the sewerage works and into our rivers. So on the pretext of providing medical help to ‘disadvantaged’ children having to part with their diseased and rotting ‘body parts’ (I know, that’s a pathetic claim, but we’ve both heard it from your fellow fluoridation fanatics so often before), fluoridation actually allows an extremely wealthy industry to dump its waste into rivers with impunity, with the full approval of our supposedly ‘environmentally sensitive’ but totally mad Government.
Now that really is what I call real entrepreneurial genius – Sir Alan Sugar would be proud of any Apprentice’s efforts to promote such a brilliant hoax on so many people, as well on as the pollution regulators themselves. So I guess that those 15 percent of people in your survey who think that fluoride is a marketing gimmick might not have been so wrong after all – they instinctively knew that there was something shifty in the whole business!
Let’s be honest, Nigel – it doesn’t work.
Maybe they heard the news released a couple of days, about the study of dental health in Detroit? Apparently, children there have really terrible teeth, even though the entire city has been fluoridated for years. When 83% of poor Afro-Americans in Detroit have severe tooth decay, can you explain to the people here in the Northwest why we should accept that fluoride is really some magic bullet that will make our teeth perfect? In Detroit it’s all down to a bad diet and actually drinking fluoridated water and soft drinks; yes, really – drinking fluoridated water has been found to be a contributory cause, not the solution. Does all this sound a little familiar to you Nigel?
But instead of telling the people here about this inconvenient and worrying discovery, you tell the Manchester Evening News that your Foundation believes that “children living in areas where the water supplies are fluoridated were 15 per cent more likely to be free from tooth decay than those children in areas without added fluoride”. Try telling that to the people of Detroit! Is it a coincidence that the News ran your Press Release advertisement? Of course it’s not - isn’t Manchester and the North West Region now the British Government’s priority target area for the next round of medical experimentation on its own subjects?
You even claim that “There have been a number of high level scientific reviews that support our position”.
OK Nigel – name them, right now.
Supporting the unsupportable - check your sources, Nigel.
In fact I recognize this unattributed claim of “15% more likely to be free from tooth decay” – it’s a favorite one of pro-fluoridationists trying to find something – anything – to lend an apparent air of respectability to their untenable position; it’s the notorious Birmingham myth.
Your Foundation appears to believe that this rubbish has the authority of the only ‘high-level scientific review’ in the past few years - the York University Centre Review, right? But isn’t that the study that actually rejected more than 90 percent of all ‘scientific’ studies on fluoridation because they were so flawed that they were scientifically worthless? The one that found that none of even the better research studies met the standard demanded of reliable clinical research?
The one that actually complained that, even after more than half a century of experimenting with fluoridation on a huge scale, the evidence for its effectiveness as a medical intervention to prevent tooth decay remains so poor that it is neither possible to say that it works or – get this, Nigel – that it is even safe?
The same Review, in fact, that has repeatedly been deliberately misquoted by fluoridation fanatics, to the extent that the highly respected authors have twice been forced to issue almost unprecedented public statements rejecting the deliberate misrepresentation of their conclusions by fluoridation fanatics?
Balance the debate and admit the dangers of fluoridation.
Frankly, Nigel, I am rather disappointed in you. Here was an opportunity for you to tell all of the people that you want to medicate with this mysterious substance just a little about the down-side of fluoridation – you know, balance the debate just a little. You could maybe have started by telling them about Elise Bassin’s re-examination of her University supervisor’s data on a lethal form of bone cancer in young boys growing up in fluoridated water areas of the USA. Why not let the folks know that, despite her supervisor’s claims to the contrary, Elise found that there were actually up to seven times the number of young lads who got osteosarcoma in fluoridated areas? And you also missed out the intriguing bit about how, although she got her Doctorate from Harvard for this excellent work, her supervisor (who was funded by Colgate – those nice people who make fluoridated toothpaste) somehow managed to suppress its publication for six (four, PC) years.
Or maybe you could have mentioned in passing that the American Dental Association recently issued a public warning in the States to mothers, advising them to stop using fluoridated water to make up their infants’ bottled feeds. Perhaps you can explain to thousands of English mothers why your Foundation and the British Government declines to issue the same warning to all of them about this, then? I know that that nice Minister, Rosie Winterton, knows all about it, and is “keeping a watch on the situation”. So that’s all right, then.
But answer me this – are British babies different from American ones, and somehow immune from the risk of fluoride poisoning?
And what about gum disease, and dental fluorosis?
For someone so concerned with dental health, I am surprised that you don’t think it worth mentioning that when drinking water is fluoridated, the amount of gum disease increases in step with the amount of dental fluorosis. Oh – did I forget to mention dental fluorosis earlier? Sorry, but so too did you - I guess that you just didn’t have time to go into it into your Press Release. You know perfectly well that fluoride causes teeth to become discolored and that, although they may be hard on the surface, this doesn’t stop them getting cavities inside – cavities that your average dentist simply doesn’t see, until the teeth break apart like rotten nuts, that is.
Yes, as you say, it does strengthen the enamel, but only from surface application - in other words, from brushing teeth with fluoride toothpaste (how much fluoride toothpaste do you need to poison a child, Nigel?) Drinking fluoride has absolutely no beneficial effect on teeth; it simply gets into the body and stays there, out of site but not entirely out of mind, seeing as how it’s also a particularly nasty nerve poison.
I guess it’s difficult to get such a complicated message across when the media give you such short time or little space to explain the full picture. It is, after all, a very complicated subject, and a busy man like yourself can hardly take time off to read through all of the thousands of research papers out there, detailing the more unpleasant side effects of fluoride supplementation.
Who gave Health Authorities the right to take away our right to refuse medication?
But there is one thing that worries me even more than the hopelessly unbalanced technical debate about children’s teeth that is going on in the media at the moment, and that is, who gave the Health Sector permission to impose fluoridation on the general public in the first place? You know, I’m sure, that Article 3 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000/C 364/01) bans all medication without consent, and that means full, informed consent.
So what gives you or your Foundation the right to propose mass medication of the English Northwest, regardless of the widespread public refusal to provide the mandatory consent? Who delegated our personal right to determine whether or not we accept involuntary medication on the order of the Government’s Health Authorities? Legal consent can only be provided by the individual – and that means every individual, not merely a majority, and certainly not at the self-appointed whim of some quango slavishly accepting political policy from a hopelessly incompetent Government.
Walking into a legal minefield – the law on medicines.
I bet that you think that because Big Brother passed a law that would force water companies to add this poison to the public water supplies (the Water Act of 2003), fluoridation is actually legal in the UK? Well, you need to know one awkward little thing, Nigel – it’s not. I won’t go into too much detail; after all, I’m sure you have legal boffins whom you can pay to sort out the relevant sources. Let me just give you a few clues.
The European Community– you remember them, that’s the crowd that developed the legal framework that we are supposed to follow – and the European Court of Justice have both made some very interesting rulings about what is, and what is not a medicine. Look, I know that legal matters are utterly boring, but in this case a little knowledge really is a good thing; take it from me, Nigel (or from my QC if you prefer) – fluoridated water is a medicine. In fact, it’s probably the largest medicinal product by volume manufactured in the UK. As such it must – absolutely – have a medicinal license before it can be marketed or administered to the public. And of course, water is a product that is marketed – just check your water bill against your meter readings.
Now you work in the medical field, Nigel, so you must be perfectly well aware that medicines can only be sold if they are packaged in dose form, with proper labels on the packaging. So where is the label on tap water, or the measured dose of fluoride? Although fluoridated tap water perfectly fits both of the definitions of a medicinal product given in Article 1 of the Medicines Directive, it does not have that all-important medicinal license. To put it simply, it’s a criminal act to sell it with the intent to prevent dental caries. So do you and your Foundation think that that’s OK? Gosh!
Does this really matter, Nigel? Well, I think that you should take advice on this, along with the Department of Health, the British Fluoridation Society, the National Fluoride Information Centre, and all those others who publicly advertise the supposed medicinal properties of fluoride. You see, under the Medicines Act it is an offence to even advertise an unlicensed medicine – quite a serious issue, in fact. And you would be rather unpleasantly surprised to find just how widely the law interprets that simple word ‘advertise’ - it even includes public promotion by word of mouth. I mean – how tight can they make these damned regulations – I mean, does that mean you can’t even recommend them if you are a professional? Yep – it surely does!
But the Government says that drinking water is not a medicine!
Now you might feel a little peeved about what I have just said, Nigel. After all, the Government’s tame Medicines Watchdog has declared that, despite the clear definitions in the Medicines Directive, fluoridated water is in some elusive fashion still not a medicine, so it does not need a license. Oh dear – that makes absolutely no difference at all! If it’s not a medicine, then water is a food – sorry, that’s the way the law goes, check it out sometime. Fluoride is indeed registered as a food additive – it is, apparently in defiance of all basic chemistry and common sense, a ‘mineral’!
And to prevent exactly the sort of objection that I’m sure you might be about to raise about what is a ‘fluoride’, the EC Food Supplements Directive makes it absolutely clear that you can’t just bung any old fluoride into foods. If the source material is not specifically authorized in Annex 2, then it’s banned – it’s that simple.
And this is where we at last come full circle, Nigel, because the fluoridation process that your Foundation recommends, and Big Brother orders, the water companies to mix into their product to add ‘fluoride’ does not use that nice, ‘natural’ fluoride at all. It exclusively uses the extremely toxic industrial chemical, hexafluorosilicic acid, or its almost equally nasty sodium derivative (that’s officially a poison, by the way – look up the Poisons Act sometime when you’ve nothing urgent to do). As far as the food supplements directive is concerned, both of these fluorosilicates are banned substances – they can’t be used to fluoridate any food; end of argument!
And it gets worse, Nigel. If water is still only a food, as it seems you and the Government wish to believe, then maybe you and your Foundation, the Government, and all of the other uninformed promoters of the alleged benefits of fluoride in preventing tooth decay should be asking you legal eagles to do some urgent homework. Don’t you know that it’s forbidden to make any medical claims for a food? Yes, that’s right – just as it’s illegal to advertise any unlicensed medicines, so it’s also a criminal offense to make any medical claims for foods and food supplements.
Catch 22?
‘Consultation’ – are you serious?
What really depresses me, Nigel, is that you and your colleagues and fellow promoters, who are pushing fluoridation as the best thing since sliced bread, are getting all of the publicity in Big Brother’s process of softening-up the public. (No, Nigel – forget the folate stuff for a moment; at least folate is actually an essential nutrient). But when those of us with some real understanding of the down-side of fluoridation attempt to get an equal crack at a public audience, the media shut them out. Look at that incident on Manchester’s Channel M Nine O’clock News a couple of weeks ago, when an interview with two experts on the darker issues of fluoridation was hastily shut up by the presenter, and their contribution completely cut out of the repeats at the week-end. A lot of folk were pretty peeved at that, and told the studio in pretty blunt terms too.
I guess because fluoridation is Government policy, shutting up the whistle-blowers has to be a priority at the moment, especially when ‘They’ are suggesting that we have a ‘consultation period’ pretty soon. Maybe you have an idea or two on how we might get over the censorship that is preventing us getting a clearer picture on this enforced and illegal public medical experimentation, and hearing at least something about the down-side of the story?
After all, you say you are alarmed at how few people out here really do understand about fluoride – “especially when Strategic Health Authorities are starting consultations on new water fluoridation schemes.” Well, I do know about fluoride, Nigel - a great deal, actually- and I do agree with you, one hundred percent, on one thing at least.
It is this; if we the people are going to be consulted, then we deserve – indeed, we and the law demand – to be allowed to hear all sides in this argument. There can be no valid consultation unless all parties consulted are aware – fully aware – of all of the issues involved.
Censorship is a really bad thing right now – but then, you don’t really plan to ask us if we want our neighbor to decide what medicine we will be forced to give our babies and children, do you? I notice that although you say “while talks are under way to introduce new water fluoridation schemes across the country”, you don’t actually say just who is doing the talking!
So if I can’t get my word in because of the way that political correctness blocks media outlets, perhaps you should explain to the people that this so-called ‘consultation’ will actually be between the Health Sector organizations themselves, and will not involve the ordinary person in the street. They can – and do, in West Cumbria - even ignore the wishes of the elected direct representatives of the public, the Councils, when they are opposed to fluoridation. Why should we think that things will change now, this time around, and that not a single soul who objects will be forcibly poisoned?
Is it not the truth that the law does not actually require you to hold a truly public consultation, indeed, that you secretly fear a truly informed one, because you know full well that history repeatedly shows exactly what you can expect if you do - you know just how unpopular fluoridation really is, don’t you?
Wherever the F-question has been properly asked, isn’t it true that the vast majority of the people say “F off!” - do you really dare to ask yet more people if they want Big Brother to F them yet again?
I am, Sir, your most humble servant,
Winston Smith Esq.
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