What kind of idiots does Minister Micheál Martin take us all to be? Or does he honestly believe that we are all such stupid gobshites that we can be codded at will or that we can’t recognise a set-up and a sham when we see one? Clearly, the Minister is beginning to believe that this country is populated by the likes of Jon Kenny’s brilliant portrayal of a county councillor – the sort of hapless gombeens going around the place with their mouths half open, because only hapless gombeens with their mouths hanging open would take this Forum on Fluoridation nonsense as anything other than the complete set-up and whitewash job that it is from start to finish.
For a start, when this charade was launched two years ago, Minister Martin in his opening address to the ass-embled gombeens began by singing the praises of the compulsory dosing of the citizenry with fluoridated drink-ing water. It was a good thing, said the Minister, it stopped teeth rotting. Best thing since the sliced pan. Here was a Minister launching what was purporting to be a serious scientific inquiry into the wisdom or otherwise of adding toxic waste to drinking water and he pre-empts that enquiry with the summary. We had the results first, then the inquiry. But what the hell, sure the gom-beens will never spot it.
Something else about this results-before-the-inquiry farce that gombeens like me were not supposed to spot was the fact that 90 per cent of those hand-picked by the Minister, to deliver the conclusions he predicted, were seen to be pro-fluoridation. This Forum on Fluoridation had all the impartiality of a Spanish Inquisition presided over by Vlad the Impaler.
By the predetermining of the results of its “findings” at its launch, this Forum lacked two fundamental requirements essential for scientific impartiality and open-mindedness. Had this been a protocol for a proposed clinical trial to investigate the efficacy of a new pharmaceutical product, the Irish Med-icines Board would not have allow-ed it to take place. This so called inquiry was fundamentally flawed from the word go.
But of course, fluoridated water is not a new pharmaceutical product. No, it is a very old pharmaceutical product that has long been force fed to the population of this country and does not have a product authorisation from the IMB. Therefore, or so it would appear, it does not have to be taken seriously. To hell with science. A sham review, a forum, a talk shop or whatever you want to call it, will do grand. Let the gombeen taxpayers fork out over €500,000 for this farce and let the status quo be maintained.
Something else that fools like us were supposed to swallow were the “findings” of this forum. In a nutshell, these boiled down to two things. Firstly, we are getting too much fluoride – the dose needs to be reduced by a third. And secondly, would you get this for a bit of science – children are to be educated to use less fluoridated toothpaste on their toothbrushes. This is coming to you from some of the best academic brains of this country. I kid you not.
On the first point there about the dose needing to be reduced. For over 40 years we have been told that one part fluoride per million parts water was the optimum dose required to prevent dental caries. Now all of a sudden we are being given to believe that two-thirds of the optimum dose, about 0.6 to 0.8 parts per million, will do the job. But where is the evidence that that is the case? There is none. So now we are all to be forced to ingest an un-known quantity of a sub-optimal dose of a toxic waste product, the beneficial eff-ects of which are unknown and unproven. That is Min-ister Martin’s Forum on Fluo-ridation for you.
And as for educating children, I mean to say this would be high farce if it were not also so very serious. The Forum knew and, at one stage, begrudgingly accepted, that our infants and children are particularly vulnerable to any potential ill-effects that fluoride might cause, like dental fluoridosis for example. The smaller the person being dosed, the greater the effect – even the Forum could work that one out. Fluoride, if it works at all, works best when applied topically as in toothpaste, not when applied systemically as in fluoridated drinking water.
So, what children are do-ing by brushing their teeth with fluoridated toothpaste is probably doing something to prevent their getting car-ies. What this State is doing to them by force-dosing them is less likely to be effective. But they are getting too much fluoride. So what do the people down at the Dental Hospital advise? Tell the children to use less fluoridated toothpaste. Blame the victims in other words. The proper scientific advice of course should be to tell the children to stop drinking State-contaminated water.
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