The Minister has a duty to deal with the fluoridation issue

From Mr Robert Pocock

VOICE
Upper Mount Street
Dublin 2

The Irish Medicines Board’s defence of its failure to act on water fluoridation (IMN 28/05/07) is based on three grounds, each of which is, in our view, invalid. First, the Medicines Directive (2004/27EC) defines a medicinal product in Article One, subsection A as: “any substance… presented as treating or preventing disease in human beings.” Subsection B adds: “Any substance administered to human beings… by exerting a pharmacological or metabolic action” is a medicinal product. Since both by presentation and by administration, fluoridated drinking water satisfies the definition in the Directive, it clearly is a medicinal product.

The argument that some foods or beverages contain added substances is irrelevant since fluoridation is by definition a medicine under the relevant Directive. Even if it were not so defined, fluoride can not be compared to say, Vitamin C, since fluoride has no nutritional function. Furthermore, the form of fluoride added to Irish drinking water is an industrial waste chemical containing contaminants such as arsenic, lead, and chromium, a circumstance that explains why fluosilicic acid has never been toxicologically attested as safe in Ireland or elsewhere.

The third defence based on the Supreme Court case (Ryan V Attorney General, 1963) – [and not 1995 as stated] has been superseded by several contrary legal decisions including that of Lord Jauncey in McColl V Strathclyde Regional Council in 1983. This found fluoridation to be an infringment of the UK Medicines Act, 1968 (involving a medicinal product without a product licence for a medicinal purpose), mirroring the situation that still obtains here in Ireland.

The Strathclyde Council was found not to have the powers to force this medicinal product into drinking water without individual informed consent. Scotland, along with Wales, and Northern Ireland, remains unfluoridated.

It seems that in this part of the EU, medicinal products are regulated in an alarming time-warp such that three million consumers, whose taps supply fluosilicic acid to them 24/7, are unprotected from an unlicensed medicine.

With the regulator again seemingly ducking its clear statutory responsibility, we are offered instead the consolation that our letter is being passed up the line to the IMB’s boss, the Department of Health. Now since the present and probably next Health Minister is such a believer in political accountability, what better test of her political integrity could there be than to face down this medicinally illegal practice?

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