Page 1496 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 27 September 1989
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The Minister referred, I think, to the National Health and Medical Research Council as an expert. Well, in one respect that is true but in another respect it is a referee, a body of people who can be called upon to look at competing evidence conducted in Australia. As the Minister said, it is the chief scientific research organisation in Australia which is able to look at that evidence, analyse it and come to some conclusion. I therefore looked for some respectable, peak scientific, medical or dental organisation in this country or anywhere in the world, national or international, that would take these competing claims, analyse them and assess whether or not the trends were in one particular direction or another. I think it is reasonable for us to do that.
Now, I have not yet been pointed to any such peak scientific, medical or dental association or organisation which has said that the introduction of fluoride in water supplies is harmful - not one. It seems to me strange indeed that nobody, no organisation of that kind, can be found to say that, with this alleged welter of evidence showing that fluoride is bad, fluoride should be removed from water supplies.
Let us look at the sorts of referees to which I turned. The National Health and Medical and Research Council, to which the Minister referred, has done extensive studies over time and it says, without any shadow of doubt it seems to me, that there is benefit in adding fluoride to water supplies. The World Health Organisation, to which the Minister also referred, again recommends the use of fluoride in water. The United States Surgeon-General has done studies and said that fluoride is beneficial in people's water supplies.
Now I turn to the opponents of fluoride. I should say before I go on that I was referred to one report - I assume it was a report; I was not given the full document - of the National Health and Medical Research Council, dated December 1953, which made comments that were adverse to fluoride, but I am not prepared to rely on this. It is 35 years old and it was done before any fluoridation occurred in Australia, and therefore before any studies on populations could be conducted in Australia. I accept the fact that the National Health and Medical Research Council's view has now changed. On the basis of seeing what fluoride actually does to water supplies, it now supports the introduction of fluoride into our water supplies.
The anti-fluoridationists say that there is no valid study which establishes a direct and clear scientific nexus between the ingestion of fluoride and improvements in any person's teeth. Frankly, I tend to think that is probably true - there probably is not such a study. It is also true that there is no single scientifically established nexus produced by research between cigarette smoking and the incidence of lung cancer, or emphysema, or heart disease,
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