Mary Ann O'Brien (Independent) | Oireachtas source

What did Dr. Hans Moolenburgh of the Netherlands know? He took a medically-based, scientifically-based legal case against the state and won in order to ban fluoridation forever in the Netherlands. What does the rest of Europe know?

I want to list the position in the rest of Europe. The Czech Republic has had no fluoridation since 1993 because it is uneconomic, not ecological, unethical and toxically debatable. Denmark has no fluoridation and toxic fluorides have never been added to the public water supplies. Finland has no fluoridation, and one city which used it, Kuopio, stopped in 1992. France has no fluoridation and fluoride chemicals are not included in the list of chemicals for drinking water treatment due to ethical as well as medical considerations. Germany has no fluoridation generally and fluoridation of drinking water is forbidden. Luxembourg has no fluoridation and fluoride has never been added to the public water supplies. Sweden has no fluoridation; the Nobel Medical Institute recommended against fluoridation and it has been banned since 1971. I could read all day on this, and while that is Internet-based information, everything I say to the Minister today is scientifically proven. Fluoridation is becoming redundant. It has been rejected in countries and communities around the world. Even Israel banned fluoridation earlier this year.

Fluoride is a lovely word, is it not? It has been in toothpaste and has been around us for years, so much that it has become embedded in our consciousness. Fluoride is hydrofluorosilicic acid. It is an unlicensed, untested medicinal substance. While it is highly poisonous, most people do not know how toxic it is. There is enough fluoride in a tube of toothpaste to kill a 12 year old child - fact. It is not something we should be putting into our water supply, thereby forcing people to take fluoride.

In the US, by law, all fluoridated toothpaste carries a poison warning which states that if a person swallows more than pea-sized amount - we all know what a Findus pea looks like - that person should contact a poison control centre. The very same toothpaste sold here in Ireland has no warning. Critically, in Ireland, fluoride is added to tap water at potentially toxic levels. A glass of Irish tap water contains the same amount of fluoride as a pea-sized amount of toothpaste. To go back over that, the pea-sized amount of toothpaste in America, by law, has to carry a poison warning yet, in Ireland, the expert group, which has never carried out any scientific studies, never tested the water supplies and never tested foodstuffs, decided not to put that warning on Irish toothpaste. These are not things Mary-Ann has read on the Internet; these are all facts and they are facts that worry me greatly.

We can talk science, and I would agree with Senator Norris that we can have balanced science for and against. There are so many wonderful scientists around the world. Indeed, America got so tired of this that, in March 2006, the National Research Council, an arm of the US National Academy of Sciences, issued a review of all the available literature on fluoride's health affects. The report was written at the request of the USA's Environmental Protection Agency. The report represented three years of deliberations by a panel of 12 scientists who were selected for their balanced views. It acknowledged the following adverse effects of fluoride not previously identified: thyroid impairment; type 2 diabetes, an issue that upsets the Minister for Health greatly; and dental fluorosis, which the whole world knows can be caused by fluoride. To again give the analogy of drinking the water and having it go past our teeth and into the body, does the Minister not think it can cause skeletal fluorosis, which results in the hip fractures and arthritis which are widespread among our elder population? That same three-year study by the 12 balanced scientists also pointed to the risk of arthritis, bone fractures, the lowering of IQ and potential brain damage, the latter especially in the presence of aluminium. All of these effects, with the possible exception of bone fractures and lower IQ, can occur at one part per million, that is 1 ml per litre.

Eminent scientists, doctors, toxicologists and chemists have written countless books and reports on the adverse effects and dangers of fluoride.

The Government has referred to reviews that suggest this is perfectly safe but the National Reseach Council's three-year study says that it is not safe. We all know that in the context of any medical controversy, we must err on the side of safety. I am not a scientist, doctor or chemist and neither is the Minister but we should not continue to put the health of our citizens at risk and charge them for it.

I ask that the Minister would examine the Irish expert group on flouridation, whose minutes and reports I read all of the time, because one of its members, Dr. Wayne Anderson of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, resigned recently - I wonder why.