Page 629 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 20 May 1992
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matter up once and for all. I expect that by the end of the private members' business part of today's agenda the Electricity and Water Act in the ACT will, once and for all, be amended and we will have the issue of fluoride off the agenda for the foreseeable future.
MS SZUTY (11.51): Madam Speaker, this Assembly has reopened the great fluoride debate, one of the issues which brought the First ACT Legislative Assembly more than adverse publicity. Members are being asked to pass a Bill which will return the fluoride level in the ACT's water supply to one part per million, even though the Social Policy Committee of the last Assembly recommended and saw passed into law a level of 0.5 parts per million. What I and many other Canberrans would have to now ask is: Why?
Expert opinion seems united in one area - that fluoride in drinking water has reduced the rate of dental caries in the population over the past 20 years. But the experts are not sure what levels below one part per million are effective. I draw the attention of the Assembly to the report by Robert M. Douglas of the ANU's National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health in the Medical Journal of Australia of April 1991. He wrote:
A number of published reports provide some basis for predicting what might happen if Australian cities and municipalities stopped artificially fluoridating their water supplies and enabled the water to return to its natural background concentration, usually around point one to point three parts per million. The working group concluded that such a reduction would inevitably result in the occurrence of dental caries, but it would not, from available data, predict with any confidence, how great this dental deterioration would be if communities were to lower the level of artificial fluoridation from, say, one part per million to point five parts per million. In particular the group noted the lack of direct data on the changing caries rate consequent upon changes in water fluoride concentration levels within the range point five to one part per million in the contemporary setting, where fluoridated dentifrices are used by a large proportion of the population.
I would put it to Assembly members that the current level of 0.5, which was introduced after much deliberation by the First Assembly, is reasonable. I think it is time we made a commitment to that First Assembly's committee's work and allowed more time for the 0.5 level to be tried and assessed. In addition, our health professionals need more time to evaluate this level of fluoridation. As I said in my opening remarks, this debate today has reopened a chapter in the history of ACT self-government that has already been thoroughly read and aired.
In closing, I reiterate that the current level of fluoridation was determined after careful deliberation by the First Assembly's Social Policy Committee and it received the support of the majority of members. I would hope that current members will not at this time join the general debunking of that First Assembly by rendering all the debate and deliberation irrelevant. I would ask members not to support yet another change, but to allow the current level of fluoridation to remain at 0.5 parts per million and to allow further informed research on the absolute level of fluoride needed in water supplies to produce a positive result for dental health.
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