International experts condemn Irish water treatment practices

Dublin – 9th August 2007

Ireland has been heavily criticized by top medical, dental, scientific and environmental professionals, including a Nobel Prize winner for Medicine. Six hundred international experts signed an online petition (www.fluorideaction.org/statement.august.2007.html) in a bid to stop the practise of fluoridation. They condemned the few countries that still fluoridate drinking water, including Ireland, claiming it is an outdated and unscientific practice.

Dr Arvid Carlsson, who received a Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2000, unequivocally stated “Fluoridation is against all principles of modern pharmacology. It's really obsolete.”

Other signatories include the President of the International Society of Doctors for the Environment and Dr Vyvyan Howard of the University of Ulster, who observed: “I’m against fluoridation: it’s a ridiculous idea based on very bad science.” Signatories come from over thirty countries.

Only a handful of countries outside the US permit drinking water to be fluoridated. These few include Canada, Australia and New Zealand, England and Ireland. It is notable that only small parts of the England adopted this mass medication measure. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland remain unfluoridated along with every other EU Member State with the exception of Ireland and some Spanish cities.

VOICE spokesperson, Robert Pocock, one of several Irish signatories, said: "This is an historic day in the campaign against fluoridation because never before has there been such a joint international condemnation of governments that fluoridate. It further exposes Minister for Health, Mary Harney TD, who, along with her ill-informed advisers, is guilty of the failings highlighted by this international alliance.”