I have written before about the failure of the Forum on Water Flouridation in Ireland to address key questions on the risks of flouridation.

Prof Denis O’Mullane of the Oral Health Services Research Centre in UCC is a member of the Forum. This Forum has been a spectacular failure. For example it had around 50 questions put to it by chemistry professor Dr Paul Connett. These were in the main simple enough kind of queries and should have been a breeze to the various academics on the Forum.

But in order to address Dr Connett’s concerns about water fluoridation, a special Sub-group was set up under the chairmanship of Prof O’Mullane. They laboured hard and long trying to address each of Dr Connett’s questions and promised to produce a report which never actually saw the light of day. At the end of the day how many of the answers to the initial 50 questions do you think they managed to get published? Go on have a guess at it. About half of them would you say?

No? Well surely they got the right answer to a quarter of them or even say to 10 out of 50?

No, sorry, wrong again. The special committee to address the 50 questions managed to publicly answer not one single solitary one of them and of course no report was produced.

Prof O’Mullane has now been awarded a grant by the Health Research Board to study Water Fluoridation and Health: The Benefits and Risks of Fluoride on the Island of Ireland, to quote the HRB’s own web-site. How much of a grant we are not told. But the actual size of this hand-out is not the point.

Irish taxpayers have already had to fork out over €253,000, spent so far by the Forum on Fluoridation, that talking-shop that has been going on now mostly in the new Dental Hospital since September 2000. An interim report was issued in December 2000.

Due to be published last October, its final report has still not seen the light of day despite repeated promises that it would do so. Leaked versions of it suggest that it is a real middle-of the-road, kick-for-touch job and that when it eventually comes out it will be recommending the continuation of this forced medication on the Irish population. I do not believe that Irish taxpayers have got value for their money from this Forum, given that it could not publicly answer even one out of 50 or so questions put to it.

Once again it is we the people of this country, who must endure a daily dose of an un-

known amount of toxic waste material being put into our drinking water and then when we have got that into ourselves we must then turn around and start paying again for research into whether this stuff is doing us more harm that good.

But it seems many of the people we are being asked to pay for this kind of research have formally expressed themselves as being in favour of the practice of fluoridation. This declared bias shall surely prejudice the perception in the public mind of the results of their research.

Others have already been found wanting when it comes to publicly answering specific questions and concerns about fluoridation. And yet it seems that these very people are being awarded the grant money for further research into the very same issues that the Forum has so far failed to provide adequate and timely answers to.

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