Page 1500 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 27 September 1989
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the Dental Health Education and Research Foundation (DHERF) was set up in 1962 and has received funding from the food and pharmaceutical industries. Its expressed objectives are "improving dental health education and improving dental research", but a great deal of its resources have been expended on the promotion of fluoridation. In 1979, donors listed in the annual report of the DHERF included Coca-Cola, the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, Cadbury-Schweppes, Australian Council of Soft Drink Manufacturers, Kelloggs (processed breakfast cereals), Scanlens (sweets), Arnotts (biscuits) and Wrigleys (chewing gum).
Obviously when a research group is interested in its research funding, to a certain extent its hands are tied. Each of these parts of the sugary food industry is at major risk if it does not have someone to blame or somewhere to look to change the direction of accusations about the dental industry. It may be that people are actually saying that: perhaps we should be looking carefully at the sugary food industry rather than looking at whether or not fluoride is in the water. And of course I would argue that that is exactly where we should go. Most importantly, Dr Diesendorf then went on to say:
The reliance, not just by the dental profession but also by bodies such as the National Health and Medical Research Council, on institutions deemed to be "expert" in the area, such as those institutions already discussed with their industrial links.
So in fact there is a link coming all the way through to those peak bodies that Mr Humphries has relied on for their research.
Let us first of all ask about fluoridation. Most of the problems that people talk about in relation to fluoridation concern ingestion of fluoride, and by having it in the water supply we have no choice but to ingest. One of the possible solutions, and the solution that I will certainly apply to my children, is not ingestion but rinsing, because the benefits of fluoride have been shown by some statistical analysis to be obtained with rinsing without giving rise to any of the side effects.
Let us remember what we are trying to achieve. We are trying to achieve looking after teeth, and when we look at ways of trying to achieve this it is incumbent upon us to look very carefully at the statistics. Fortunately, in Australia, we have one of the very best forms of statistical analysis. We have the city of Brisbane that has had no fluoride and we have cities like Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and so on that have had fluoride. When Mr Humphries referred to statistics, he used the statistics that were presented by professionals, the pro-fluoride lobby, to show how Canberra has a far better dental caries rate - in other words, fewer caries -
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