UKCAF website

Human Rights, Civil Liberties
and Water Fluoridation -
an update.

Doug Cross 14th April 2011

Since Bob Carton and I wrote our joint paper back in 2003, comparing UK and USA human rights and ethical issues raised by water fluoridation, the human rights challenges to this form of compulsory medication have become much stronger. Early opposition to fluoridation was based largely on extensive scientific research that cast srong doubts on the claims being made for the practice, and on the potential medical side effects.

Over the years the evidence on the lack of efficacy and safety has growm enormously, but arguments have still concentrated more on the scientific problems associated with fluoridation. But recently, startingfrom roughly around 2005, the emphasis began to change. Opponents began to rely much more heavily on legal challenges, taking a much closer look at the validity in law of what the general public instinctively knew to be a serious wrong - the perception that fluoridation is 'mass medication'.

Legal challenges based on the argument that fluoridated water is indeed a medicinal product, and subject to medicinal law, product licensing, and the rules of clinical intervention, are beginning to take root, with a number of actions in the UK, Australia, Canada and the USA. Ranked against these arguments is the almost universal, but legally flawed, dismissal of fluoridated water as not being a medicine.

The issue of consent - or rather, the absence of consent - from often an overwhelming majority of the target populations is now coming to the fore, and there is considerable confusion over what is, and what is not, allowed under international and national codes of medical practice. All take their modern form from the response to the exposure of the excesses at the Nuremburgh trials following the Second World War.

But there is a general misunderstanding of how human rights issues differ from the frameworks of civil liberties under which different States and the communities living under their protection actually operate.

Human Rights are NOT identical to civil liberties, although the two are often referred to as if they are, and the ways in which individual States implement human rights and civil liberties can vary substantially. An in-depth study of such variations is beyond the scope of this study, and would make a fascinating study in its own right, but this new commentray aims simply to show how the two concepts differ and how they are applied - or mis-applied - to the practice of water fluoridation.

There are many additional issues that are emerging as more detailed reseacrh is completed. Some of these now provide the basis of yet more challenges under the banner of human rights. For example, some ethnic groups have been found to be more susceptible to the adverse effects of chronic fluoride exposure than others. This is seen as implying that there may be an inherent inequality in resistance to fluoride in racially diverse communities that unscrupulous and prejudiced individuals or groups may can result in selectively greater attempt to use to gain advantage over more vulnerable racial sub-groups in the community.

For many years mainstream research in the field of fluoride and fluoridation has been dominated by the unverified but politically correct doctrine alleging the reliability, efficacy and safety fo fluoridation. Poor quality studies have dominated dental research for decades, and the newly discovered variations in vulnerability of different racial and ethnic groups has only recently begun to emerge into the literature. These issues are still poorly understood, and i have noit attempted to deal with them here.

My main theme in this study is the clarification of the differences between human rights and civil liberties, and the interactions of these two occasionally conflicting legal and moral codes.

For the full commentary, please download the PDF file by

CLICKING HERE.