INDEPENDENT– When is it right for a government to mass-medicate the public? It’s hard to imagine a scenario. If we faced the spread of a new and lethal plague, most people would probably accept draconian intervention. But it would have to be serious.

Today, however, we’re told by the Government’s Alan Johnson that he intends to pursue a policy of mass medication of the British public. Not to prevent smallpox or the bubonic plague, but to tackle tooth decay. Well, tooth decay is bad news, but it’s hardly the stuff of nightmares. However, fluoride, the medicine he’s chosen, may well be.

We don’t know if fluoride works. In the United States, where 65 per cent of people are routinely subjected to the chemical, the worst tooth decay occurs in poor neighbourhoods of the largest cities, the vast majority of which have been fluoridated for decades. When fluoridation was halted in parts of Finland, East Germany, Cuba and Canada, tooth decay actually decreased.

One of the reasons for this is that fluoride is believed to work best when applied directly, for example to the tooth. Drinking fluoride to prevent cavities is like swallowing bandages to cure a broken arm. Another reason is that a policy of mass medication through the water supply assumes that we are all the same age, size and weight, and therefore require the same dose.

What we do know is that fluoride is toxic – so toxic, in fact, that in 1984, the makers of Colgate, Procter & Gamble, reportedly admitted that a small tube of their toothpaste “theoretically at least contains enough fluoride to kill a small child”.

Continue reading about Is Fluoride Safe?.

© The Independent, 2008

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