I noticed this in the guardian and thought it worth bringing to everyone’s attention (again!)
A toothless argument
The success of Britain’s anti-fluoride brigade is a dismal commentary on a rigid, embattled nation
Long ago, far down memory lane, I was writing editorials for the Daily Post in Liverpool, where Suralick, much like the now further ennobled Suralan, was proprietor “over the bridge”. Each morning, the Post’s editor would hurry over that bridge to see what Suralick wanted said – and, as often as not, he’d commission a fresh blast on the evils offluoridation, one of his abiding preoccupations. So I excoriated mass medication by bureaucratic fiat as instructed, and happily forgot about the whole damned convoluted subject when I left to go to Manchester. But half a lifetime later, nothing’s changed.
Suppose you’re in New York or Los Angeles reading this, and you feel like a glass of tap water. It will be fluoridated: 70% of America’s water supplies – including all the big city ones – are treated thus. Thirsty down under? Australia is nearly 70% fluoridated, too – just like Ireland, where the average number of decayed or filled teeth per child is 1.3, against 2.3 in non-fluoridated Northern Ireland. But the same glass of water in Britain has only a one in 10 chance of stopping such rot. Our wan efforts at fluoridation mostly ground to a halt before Harold Wilson entered Downing Street, with under six million covered. And only today, at long, aching last, are we trying to do better.
Welcome to Southampton where the primary health care trust and strategic health care authority are agreeing the final details with Southern Water. Fluoridation gets under way there next year. Maybe Bristol and Manchester will manage to follow on soon. Maybe the absolutely overwhelming weight of medical evidence in favour of fluoridation will tell in the end. But don’t celebrate yet because the whole non-history of treating water here in the UK is a saga of doomy tunes, manic melodies and democratic impotence.
Our children’s teeth have endured decades of decay because we left progress to pressure groups making noise. What didn’t happen next is a wider text for the times.
To begin with, in broad-brush terms, Whitehall generally endorsed fluoridation but didn’t specifically enjoin Britain’s water companies to follow suit. The companies, apprehensive about legal challenges, sat on the sidelines. In 2003, a new Water Act lifted courtroom shadows and made the whole implementation business reasonably automatic as long as profound local consultations took place. Southampton jumped through those hoops last year in a blizzard of learned paperwork.
Some 10,000 residents – out of 200,000 or more – took sides. The Daily Echo demanded a referendum. The tide of opinion ran 75% to 25% against fluoridating. But still the health authority went ahead. And quite right, too.
Forget, for a moment, the morass of conflicting expert opinion available here.– studies by York University, pronouncements by the World Health Organisation, countervailing scraps of research from hither and yon. It isn’t sensible to get bogged down amid the scientific tit and tat of 40 years past. The plain fact is that 350 million or more people around the globe drink fluoridated water, show no evident sign of debility as a result (bar a little occasional staining) and enjoy markedly less dental decay.
Nobody, for all the hysteria, thinks that Obama’s America is sliding down a devilish medical slope because it drinks fluoridated water. Nobody reckons that Birmingham is sick of some unidentified palsy that non-fluoridated Manchester escapes. Nobody can point to evident affliction in fluoridated Newcastle or Gateshead. Nobody can mount an effective argument against the entire weight of British and international evidence. It’s a done deal, a redundant debate, a long overdue moment to move on.
Yet we don’t. The 7,500 dissidents in Southampton – supported by theGreen party and Daily Mail – banged away just as ferociously as when Suralick ordered another editorial blast. Science didn’t wither their fury. Decades of irrefutable evidence were harangued out of existence. And it will be like that all over again when any caravan of commonsense leaves the Solent and moves on.
Community politics, the mantra of the moment? They only work if the dozily reasonable who know that fluoridation is a good thing for their kids get off their backsides and challenge the green ink brigade. They only function if the obvious holes in the counter-arguments are drilled and filled. It’s a dismal commentary on unchanging, embattled Britain. Perhaps Suralick would have moved on to Frankenstein Foods and GMnightmares by now, if he’d lived: but he still wouldn’t be drinking the water.
