Integrity lost
The final comment by Margaret Burgess in her excellent letter (Ban the bottle, March 15) is a timely reminder of the head in the sand attitude by the Ministry of Health to community water fluoridation issues in New Zealand.
Visiting Professor Paul Connett saying that governments of countries still using fluoridation, in spite of the information now available, have lost their integrity, is the truth.
In this respect the New Zealand ministry lost its integrity decades ago, when it rejected the international research of Dr John Colquhoun, former Auckland principal dental officer, who came to the conclusion that fluoridation is invalid in theory and ineffective in practice as a preventive of dental caries, and is dangerous to the health of consumers.
Another stark example of lack of integrity is when, several years ago, the ministry contracted the Hutt Valley DHB to manage a National Fluoridation Information Service, which was intended to provide ‘independent’ advice on fluoride to health authorities, local bodies and the public, but contained in the contract was a provision that prohibited the NFIS from publishing any material that contradicted the ministry’s pro-fluoridation policy.
There are many more, including the costly campaigns of misinformation mounted by district health boards whenever there was a challenge to the establishment’s misguided fluoridation beliefs.
The current Minister of Health, the Hon David Clark, is still spinning the ideological line that he has confidence in the advice he has received from the ministry that fluoridation is an effective, safe and affordable public health measure to improve oral health.
Has he not been made aware of the mother-child study, ‘Prenatal Fluoride Exposure and Cognitive Outcomes in Children at 4 and 6 — 12 Years of Age in Mexico,’ which was funded by three US government agencies and published in one of the most highly respected environmental health publications in the world?.
What effort has he made to warn pregnant women about the potential that such a common practice as water fluoridation could be impacting their unborn children’s brains?
Early last year, in the ‘Medical Journal of Chile,’ researchers recommended that the Chilean government stop fluoridation by showing that swallowing fluoride can cause bone, thyroid, neurological and skin damage, without reducing tooth decay, and that theories which gave birth to fluoridation have been scientifically disproved, making fluoridation a waste of money and a detriment to health
What also does the Minister say about work of the Cochrane Collaboration, widely regarded as the gold standard of scientific rigor in assessing effectiveness of public health policies, which reviewed every study done on fluoridation that they could find and identified only three studies since 1975 that addressed the effectiveness of fluoridation on tooth decay in the population at large? These papers determined that fluoridation does not reduce cavities to a statistically significant degree in permanent teeth.
Irrespective of growing and wellresearched concern about fluoride as a neurotoxin, there is ample evidence that