Health Minister Micheal Martin’s recent Dail defence of continued fluoridation has been compared to the worst type of Soviet science and the minister himself ‘an embarrassment to the Irish medical profession’. So says US Chemistry Professor, Dr Paul Connett, who has testified to several international investigations into the controversial mass practice including to the Irish Fluoridation Forum and to the US Environmental Protection Agency Science Committee as recently as May 6th 2003.
Commenting on Minister Martin’s Dail claim that his Fluoridation Forum took ‘an evidence-based approach’ towards fluoridation, Dr Connett dismissed it as outrageous since most of the scientific evidence of the health effects of fluoridation was simply ignored. Of all the international scientific primary studies into health effects, only that on bone (damage) was addressed and even then, it comprised only 2 pages(122-3) of the 295 page Forum Report.
The Forum’s subcommittee still has not replied to ’50 Reasons to oppose fluoridation’ promised to Dr Connett at a meeting attended by the minister in Cork in autumn 2000.
Along with other internationally-recognised experts on fluoridation, Dr Connett published in association with VOICE, a Scientific Critique of the Minister’s investigation, describing its key conclusion that fluoridation has ‘no adverse health effects’ as ‘blatantly false’.
“How can we have any confidence in a minister who is deaf to the national and international criticism of a practice that is now totally discredited from the Pyrenees to the Urals?” said VOICE spokesman Robert Pocock adding “worse still, he insults the Dail by simply ignoring Deputy Gormley’s question as to why the Swiss city of Basel has stopped fluoridation after 41 years. It also insults the 90% of people here who already told the Forum they don’t want fluoride in their tap water.”
Not only could the Swiss city councillors find no evidence that fluoridation actually prevents tooth decay, but they were worried that fluoridation’s effects on bone (fluorosis) are downplayed as are the risks to babies and children.
“This is the same evidence that the Minister’s experts ignored, yet he has so little regard for the Dail that he ignores it too. Is it any wonder that public confidence in this health minister has almost evaporated” said the VOICE spokesman.
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