Page 1206 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 23 August 1989
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have the AMA coming out in support of this, and the Dental Association.
What is the issue here? Why is the medical profession opposed to the removal of fluoridation? I put it to you that those people have not read the facts. The people who present the fluoride case are biased because of their academic leanings. They have been presenting this case for fluoride over a number of years. They have hung their academic responsibilities and their opinions on outdated and incorrect information. We hear from some members of the AMA - not all, I must add - that there has been no proof of illness caused by fluoride. That is absolute rot. How can we have a highly toxic chemical, which, up until 1946 was used only as rat bait and an insecticide, now being put into our water supply on the whim of a group within the American continent for political reasons? At the end of World War II we had these people coming back from the devastations in Europe wanting to do something for community health, and they seized on the fluoride issue.
The World Health Organisation has stated that fluoride is a highly toxic poison. I have here an article from the World Health Organisation stating that fluoride poisoning can cause vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, muscle spasm, convulsions, et cetera. It is recognised world wide as the most highly toxic poison known to man. Fluorine is so reactive it does not exist in the free state anywhere. It always binds and forms salts, and that is how we get the word "fluoride".
So here we have a situation where we are putting a highly toxic substance into the water supply. The official line from the Dental Association and from the AMA is that it does not cause health defects in anybody at all. That is absolute rubbish, because we all know that some people are allergic to strawberries and some people cannot eat wheat. Your general practitioner knows that some forms of antibiotics cannot be taken by some people. Some people cannot handle penicillin. Yet here we have these people telling us that something that can affect the molecular structure, something that can affect cell development in a foetus, directs itself only to the teeth. That is absolute rubbish. I stress that whenever I can.
We know that in India, for example, in areas where there is malnutrition, water with a level of 0.8 parts per million - less than is put into our water supply here - is causing necrosis of the long bones. That is an explosion of the long bones, actually causing physical deformities.
What we hear from the AMA and those proponents of fluoride is, "All right; well, that is in an area where you have malnutrition". Of course, we all know there is no malnutrition in Australia, do we not? If you go to old people's homes, where people are still living at home but cannot cook for themselves, you will see that we have malnourished people in our country as well. I am deeply
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