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EU Health Commissioner Dalli gets in a spin over 'one-size-fits-all' medicine.

Doug Cross 16th April 2011

"The pharmaceutical industry in Europe is on the leading edge of innovation and technology. One of its latest developments is personalised medicine . . . Innovation can help provide solutions tailored to different patient groups as opposed to a "one-size-fits-all" solution. This can make the difference between cure or a life of suffering. This is why personalised medicines need to be developed in a way that delivers efficiency, safety and high quality to all."

(John DALLI, European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy, at a conference on "Innovation in Healthcare: from Research to Market" Brussels, Belgium, 30 March 2011)

You would expect the man in charge of the health of the EU's half a billion people to be competent, reliably informed, and consistent in his discharge of the huge responsibility that comes with his high office.

In fact, Commissioner John Dalli is a man of the moment, a straw in the wind. Asked to speak to a conference on the role of 'Innovation in healthcare; from research to market.' in Brussels two weeks ago, he assured the assembled throng,

"I have made innovation in Health a priority."

Whilst the sentiment is all firmly in place, the reality is somewhere else entirely.

Commissioner Dalli seems strangely unaware that 'personalised medicine' was around long before Big Pharma took control of the chemical health modification business. 'One Size' medication is itself a relatively new innovation, and the most well-known form is, of course, the administration of fluorosilicic acid and similar highly disturbing chemicals in community drinking water.

The global pharmaceuticals industry is far ahead of the Commissioner on this. For over a century it has been busy inventing ever-more 'personal' conditions that justify yet more tailored artifacts for their treatment. The Commissioner's eagerness to abolish the use of 'one-size-fits-all' medicines in favour of personalised and individually tailored medicines fits in cosily with Big Pharma's ambitions.

The administration of extremely cheap biochemically active substances to entire communities, regardless of each individual's needs is the ultimate example of such 'One Size' medication. The potential profit from an expansion of this practice is enormous, especially when, like fluoride, around 99% of the medicine is never actually consumed but consigned directly to the drains and sewers.

Both we and SCHER have kept Commissioner Dalli fully informed on the well-established problems of water fluoridation. As he is very well aware, adding toxic fluoride, in whatever form, does indeed 'make the difference between a cure and a life of suffering'. But it's not exactly in the manner that he suggested in his speech.

Were the costs of this discredited and damaging practice to be allocated to an alternative conventional form of dental intervention that actually works, then a cure would indeed be possible. The lives of victims forced to cope with the trauma of dental fluorosis would no longer be blighted by this disfiguring 'cosmetic' defect.

And, for those young men who would otherwise develop far more serious and life-threatening side effects, such as osteosarcoma, the 'lifetime of suffering' caused by the 'One-size-fits-all' treatment that he appears to endorse would be replaced by normal and greatly extended lives.

Commissioner Dalli, we have been watching with disgust the rising tally of the 'lifetime of suffering' that your continued procrastination over this 'OneSize' quack medication continues to impose on many thousands of EC infants. Since the SCHER first reported their provisional conclusions, almost a year ago, at least 14,000 more children have been condemned to a lifetime of trauma from seriously disfiguring dental fluorosis alone.

Those 'personalised medicines . . . that deliver efficiency, safety and high quality' to those who actually need them, to which you so pompously refer in your speech, already exist. Why, then, do you not order them to be used, instead of continuing to evade your responsibility to protect our children by refusing to eradicate this crude and unethical 'One Size' compulsory treatment? It does neither you nor the pharmaceutical industry the credit that you clearly crave.