Southampton is the guinea pig, neighbours beware! (From Andover Advertiser)

Southampton is the guinea pig, neighbours beware!

3:55pm Friday 4th September 2009 in Letters

ANDOVER Advertiser readers may know that here in Southampton we are currently living under the threat of fluoridation of our water supply, against our will.

A recent consultation produced a response of 72 per cent against fluoridating, yet the unelected Strategic Health Authority voted to force Southern Water to fluoridate our water supply.

This is due to go ahead in 2010. The group Hampshire Against Fluoridation is campaigning to get this decision reversed.

I want Andover people to know what’s going on here because Fluoridation is being put back on the agenda for discussion by NHS trusts and councils all over England.

Southampton is virtually a test case, the first one under the new law; our people have effectively become guinea-pigs. Neighbouring populations could be next unless this dangerous nonsense is stopped now.

Here is the background to all this.

In October 2007, a paper in the British Medical Journal by three eminent doctors exposed a scandal about the way the government was so vigorously pushing water fluoridation on to the population of England.

That paper told how the Department of Health had misrepresented the results of the University of York’s research findings, called the ‘York Review’, so as to give an over-optimistic assessment of the evidence in favour of fluoridation, and had 'cherry picked' the parts of that review that they wanted us to know about, including results of studies of poor quality, but left out what they didn't want us to know.

They had manipulated the language in which the data was reported to make it look as if fluoridation was a great deal safer than it probably was.

These were pretty serious accusations; about a ‘sexed up’ dossier in fact.

The authors of the York Review could not recommend that water fluoridation was safe, and they had called on the government to undertake proper controlled trials before spreading fluoridation further.

Did the government heed this advice? No such luck. They did the opposite, went on relentlessly promoting fluoridation to local NHS trusts, and announced that they would look further into safety doubts after more fluoridation.

That would therefore involve the use of large populations as guinea-pigs without their consent.

The authors of the BMJ paper also added that the Department of Health's objectivity was “questionable".

Until the time of the publication of the report, the government ( we taxpayers!) had funded the British Fluoridation Society, which had been set up expressly to push for fluoride to be added to water supplies in as many areas as possible.

We may ask ourselves which is worse: MPs’ moats and duck islands courtesy of the taxpayer, or the production by government of scurrilous propaganda that subverts democratic processes and forces us to drink potentially poisoned water that hasn’t been properly checked for safety?

You can keep up with what’s going on by visiting: the Hampshire Against Fluoridation website on www.hampshireagainstfluoridation.org Sue Robson, Dundonald Close, Southampton.

Source: The British Medical Journal Oct 5th 2007, in The Guardian Oct 5th 2007