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Inadmissible evidence.

The impending Judicial Review will examine whether Parliament's wish that public agreement to water fluoridation must be the deciding factor was ignored when the Consultation Regulations were drawn up.

But the evidence given to Parliament during the fluoridation debates was itself scientifically illiterate, and may have improperly influenced the Members and the provision of the secondary legislation on consultation.

So should the Judicial Review now also examine the 'cogency' of the evidence given to Parliament and used repeatedly by the Health Authority, and the Health sector's irrational rejection of reliable scientific evidence of the serious medical risks of water fluoridation?

Doug Cross, 19th September 2009

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Eliminating public consent - keeping the decision in the hands of the Establishment.

In the current dispute over the legitimacy of the consultation process in Southampton, in which the decision to fluoridate the City's public water supply was taken by the local Health Authority despite a clear and substantial majority of public opposition, it is worth re-examining the evidence on which Parliament made the momentous decision to approve the Water Bill in 2003.

It is clear that Members of Parliament required an assurance that public opinion would be a deciding factor, and that the decision to fluoridated would under no circumstances be taken by 'unelected Health Authorities'. The role of democratically elected Local Authorities and the general public, individually and collectively, in deciding the question was absolutely manifest from the debate, yet in the subsequent lgislation on public consultation, no such assurances were included.

But it is also apparent that Members were given highly improper evidence that purported to show that fluoridation was both safe and effective - the inevitable but unproven mantra of fluoridation advocates. This evidence that failed to meet even the most elementary scientific criteria, and supports the view that the impending Judicial Review needs to examine not merely the authority of the South Central Stategic Health Authority to dismiss public opposition to its planned imposition of fluoridation in the City, but also the alleged 'cogency' of its decision rather more stringently than is planned at present.

The November 2003 debate on the 'Prohibition of Artificial Fluoridation of Water'

In November 2003 the British Government’s ambition to increase fluoridation across the country came under a dramatic attack from the House of Lords, when Members proposed an amendment that would have abolished all existing and planned fluoridation operations. It would also have banned pro-fluoridation publicity and public consultation, and abolished indemnity to water undertakers. The Lords’ amendment proposed a complete reversal of the pro-fluoridation clauses in the Bill, by recommending that “water undertakers shall be prohibited from artificially increasing the fluoride content of the water supplied by them.” The issues were debated in the Commons in November 2003.

Failure to implement existing medical law

This was the most direct threat ever made to water fluoridation in the UK, and the pro-fluoride lobby immediately swung into action, using the most reliable asset of the pro-fluoridation lobby - the general ignorance of the Members themselves. Speakers from both sides of the House repeatedly complained about the impropriety of mass medication, and it was generally agreed that this was indeed a medical intervention, even though it employed a product that had no medicinal licence.

But instead of referring to matter for scrutiny under the existing legislation dealing with the supply of medicinal products to the public, which had been in force since 1968, the Members merely grumbled into their beards and passed on to other issues.

They ignored the fact that the Quango regulating medicines in the UK - the MHRA - had repeatedly avoided declaring fluoridated water to be a medicine, even though it was, and had looked the other way whilst this unlicensed product was administered daily to six million British subjects. Pro-fluoridation Members, of course, did nothing to remind their colleagues that the House had within its grasp all the legal ammunition that it needed to ban fluoridation! Yet over 25 years

ago, in 1983, Lord Jauncey ruled that fluoridated water fell within the Medicines Act 1968, “Section 130 defines ‘medicinal product’ and I am satisfied that fluoride in whatever form it is ultimately purchased by the respondents falls within that definition.”

As a result, the dangerously flawed Water Bill was allowed to progress to completion and ratification. Effectively, this incompetence in scrutinising the existing medicinal legislation in the English and European legal frameworks, and enforcing explicit rulings on the supply of medicinal products by the European Court of Justice, allowed Parliamentary sanction to be obtained for an unavoidable and unlawful medical assault on the public.

The issue of public consent to fluoridation.

During this debate speaker after speaker commented that if any new scheme were to be put into place, then it should only be with the consent of the public. The suggestion that local Health Authorities should decide whether or not to fluoridate new areas was strongly rejected - they were known to be strongly biased in favour of fluoridation, and were therefore not impartial.

Crucially, Members expressed the wish that the decision should only be made by democratically elected Councils and by the public. It is precisely this issue that is now the subject of a Judicial Review in respect of the recent Southampton ‘Consultation’ charade.

So the recent attempt by Barry Cockcroft, Chief Dental Officer of England, to employ spurious legal argument in order to exclude local Council Health Oversight and Scrutiny Committees from fluoridation consultations, in his notorious ‘Guidelines on Fluoridation’ in February 2008, was both highly contrived and utterly improper. It was also completely at odds with the expectations of Members of the Commons in debates on the Water Bill in 2003.

But ultimately, it fell to the Department of Health to provide the treacherous change in emphasis in the implementation of the fluoridation consultation process itself. The key to understanding how the dice were loaded by the Civil Service lies in the differences between the two central pieces of legislation.

The Water Act was primary legislation' - law repeatedly debated and modified by Members of both Houses of Parliament. In contrast, the Fluoridation (Consultation)(England) Regulations were contained in a Statutory Instrument - secondary legislation drawn up by the Dept of Health.

Such secondary law is often simply nodded through, often in large batches, by rather less-than-vigilant MPs. In this case, they failed to realise that the provision for 'local' decision-making did NOT mean that local people, or even local Councils, would decide on fluoridation, as Parliament has expected. Instead the wording was carefully crafted to allow 'local' to refer only to the regional Strategic Health Authority(SHA).

The insertion of the sneaky clauses allowing the SHA to exercise its discretion over the 'cogency' of the arguments, and so discount any opinion of local members of the public, was clearly completely against the original wishes of Parliament, but entirely consistent with the Department's absolute determination to fluoridate as much of the population as possible. Let us hope that the learned Judge will view this underhand perversion of the wishes of Parliament and democratic decision-making as a fit subject for censure in his Review.

The lack of 'cogency' in the evidence provided to Parliament, and relied on by the Health Authority.

Fluoride myth and science fact.

But just to make sure that the proposal was strongly challenged, the pro-fluoridation lobby brought out its main protagonist, MP Andy Burnham. He it was who proposed the original Early Day Motion that resulted in the insertion of the fluoridation clauses into the Water Bill.

His zeal in promoting an issue of which he had virtually no real understanding appeared to have affected his judgment, because he proceeded to introduce into the debate a spurious and scientifically illiterate argument that had been roundly condemned as flawed and invalid for over half a century.

In this crucial debate Mr Burnham repeatedly relied on conclusions derived from data on dental decay in 5 year-old children, collected by the British Association for the Study of Community Dentistry (BASCD). He told Members that these proved that fluoridation resulted in greatly reduced dental decay rates in children in fluoridated areas, and passionately argued for the administartion of fluoridated water to 'socially deprived' communities.

He ignored the fact that children's dental health has been improving for years in both unfluoridated and fluoridated States, and that only a very small minority of children suffer from the exaggerated claims of the more vociferous fluoride proponents.

His arguments undoubtedly persuaded some Members to oppose the Lords' Amendment. Ultimately they may have even influenced Parliament when it passed the final reading to the Water Bill, and persuaded the House to include those fluoridation-enabling clauses to which the Lords so strongly objected.

The fundamental flaw in Mr Burnham’s evidence.

The fallacy on which the claim that fluoridation reduces dental decay is based relies almost exclusively on the direct comparison of the raw data on the prevalence of dental caries in 5 year-old children in fluoridated and unfluoridated areas.

And indeed, in some locations - but by no means all - there may appear to be a slight difference, but this vanishes entirely in older children who have their permanent teeth. Predictably, pro-fluoridation lobbyists invariably avoid referring to this far more relevant age group in their attempts to convince listeners of the supposed beneficial effects of fluoride.

Making a direct comparison of children’s teeth is difficult because there are many things that can affect a child’s dental health. But the greatest problem with this comparison is that fluoridation inhibits the rate at which the teeth of young children emerge from their gums.

The delay may be from a few months to well over a year, so in fluoridated areas, the teeth of young children are fewer in number, and younger, than those of children in unfluoridated areas. This renders any comparison of crude data on dental decay in children of the same age completely unscientific and misleading - in scientific terms, it is a comparison between unmatched samples, and entirely meaningless.

It is therefore improper to compare the dental health of same-age young children, because the effects of fluoridation must be compared on teeth of the same dental age, and not simply according to the chronological age of the children themselves.

The long history of the fluoridation fallacy

The evidence that Mr Burnham provided Parliament has been known to be worthless for more than half a century, and has been repeatedly rejected by reputable scientists and statisticians. Many experienced researchers around the world have reported this effect, and have emphasised that it completely invalidates any direct comparison of the prevalence of dental caries in young children of a specific age. In 1964, for example, Lord Douglas of Balloch wrote

'If the eruption of teeth is delayed, then age for age they have been exposed to the forces of decay for a shorter period, and age for age there are fewer of them. This could make nonsense of the comparisons . . . between children in fluoride areas and children in non-fluoride areas.'

More recently, in a Guest Editorial for the Journal Fluoride in 2001, Dr. Hardy Limeback commented
'each and every water fluoridation study conducted to date is flawed since not a single study took into account that ingested fluoride delays tooth eruption by about a few months to over a year. This means that the test communities had children who were dentally younger compared to the control communities. The unerupted teeth would not be exposed to the same carbohydrate challenges and may end up with the same dental decay given the same amount of time in the oral cavity.'

If a professional scientist were to rely on such a discredited argument in academic circles, it would probably be regarded as tantamount to scientific fraud.

Your health in whose hands?

Mr Burnham is now Secretary of State for Health. He has no scientific or medical qualifications whatever - not unusual in the guardians of our public health and medical services in recent years. His ill-advised reliance on defective interpretations of data that lie outside his own sphere of competence may well be excused as being due to an unfortunate ignorance of statistical methods.

But Senior Ministers of the Crown are expected to ensure that the advice they give the House is reliable and verifiable, especially in matters that may affect the well-being of the public for whom they hold responsibility.

Since few Members of Parliament had scientific training that enabled them to identify the fundamental flaws in Mr Burnham’s arguments, the ability of the Commons to come to a balanced conclusion over the fluoridation controversy must be regarded as, at best, questionable.

Mr Burnham’s long-term personal support of the fluoride lobby is a matter of public record - his hasty resignation from the ignominious post of Vice-President of the British Fluoridation Society (BFS) received some media attention recently. But the close association of the BFS with the BASCD, compilers of the dental health data on which Mr Burnham relied, is less well-known - its former President, Dr Colwyn Jones, for example, is registered as a Director of the BFS.

Hiding the adverse effects of fluoridation - the scarcity of data on dental fluorosis.

In its instructions to compilers of children’s dental health data the BASCD says that even serious cases of dental fluorosis should be counted as ‘sound', so just how many children (and adults) in the UK suffer from this supposedly ‘cosmetic’ disfiguring damage remains virtually a State secret.

The prevalence of fluorosis in England, and especially in the pride of the pro-fluoride lobby’s spurious dental health ‘League Tables’, Birmingham, is never mentioned. Whilst fluoridation advocates cite Birmingham children as having the best teeth in England (they don't, once they get their permanent teeth!) the prevalence of fluorosis in the fluoridated West Midlands is a closely guarded secret. It is therefore extremely difficult to assess just how many people have been damaged by this disreputable practice.

But in the November 2003 Commons debate, Glasgow MP James Wray at last let the cat out of the bag. He told the House of Commons
“the Government never reported back on the professor who went into five primary schools (in long-fluoridated Birmingham) and found that 34 per cent. of the children had dental fluorosis—caused by chronic fluorine poisoning. That is where the disease comes from—a poisonous waste. . . . Under the 1926 food and drugs legislation, it is a crime to add any kind of fluoride to foodstuffs.”

The promotion to Members of Parliament of Birmingham as a shining example of the supposed efficacy and safety of water fluoridation was utterly inappropriate. The arguments of Mr Burnham and his associates were ill-informed (at best) and thoroughly inexcusable, and should have been scrutinised with far more care than appears to have been exercised during the debates on the Water Bill.

Is it not surprising that the man most responsible for the Government’s present fluoridation expansion programme - one that would expose another twenty million people in England to an unavoidable daily exposure to a known cumulative poison - should now hold the post of Secretary of State for Health?

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References

Jauncy 1983. Lord Jauncey. Opinion of Lord Jauncey in causa Mrs Catherine McColl (A.P) against Strathclyde Regional Council. The Court of Session, Edinburgh, 1983.

Cheng, Chalmers and Sheldon 2007. Adding fluoride to water supplies.
http://www.appgaf.org.uk/data/433-water-fluoridation.pdf