END OF FREE MILK FOR KIDS, CURSE OR BLESSING??

The main news on this rather grey and damp Sunday morning is that the government is considering ending free milk for under-fives as part of the spending cuts.

According to my AOL news page and most of the Sunday Newspapers, "Ministers said there was no evidence the nursery milk scheme improved health and, at a cost of around £50 million a year, was too expensive to run. Health minister Anne Milton admitted the move - which would echo the Conservative Party's removal of free school milk in 1971 - would be "highly controversial" and affect children in low income families.

Whether this is a curse of a blessing remains to be seen however. from the point of view of an anti-fluoride campaigner. Milk has already been poisoned with fluoride for several years in Sheffield and parts of Liverpool and God knows where else, and most people don't seem to know about this. Most fluoride campaigners however most see the milk supply to kids as a particularly evil way of distributing this industrial waste

There is little if any evidence to show that fluoride works either systemically or topically and recent research has raised growing health fears about the increasing intake of fluoride from many foods and drinks, especially in areas where water is already fluoridated such as Birmingham and the west Midlands. There are even differences of opinion about whether the calcium in the milk reduces the danger from fluoride or whether the fluoride blocks the the calcium intake. but as a long term anti-pollution campaigner with Friends of the Earth, i always adopt and recommend the Precautionary Principle. And we should be particularly careful when using young children as Guinea Pigs.

If health ministers really wish to save money in these straightened times, they should start by removing fluoride from the kids milk supplies and immediately follow this by removing it from the drinking water supplies and discontinuing all plans to extend fluoridation any further. Surely it cannot be right to be squandering vast sums on fighting its own electorate who have already made it clear to councils and Government that they don't want it. I would even suggest that they go the whole nine yards and scrap the SHAs and PCTs who are both little better than chocolate tea pots and who don't seem to represent anyone but themselvs and their cronies. Perhpas then we might have enough money to keep the free milk supply to young kids and even have some money left over for proper dentistry. This would be a "safe and effective" way of strengthening our finances and our democracy.

Of course this would assume that our new Coalition is a little more enlightened than the previous bunch of neredowells and as one of my more cynical friends put it, "if they had had a brain, they would have been really dangerous. However Having already received answers from Junior Health Minister Milton I dont hold out much hope of radical changes and will expect business as usual. After all, there are still many fences to be sat upon and lots of new bums ready and willing to accept the challenge. Meanwhile, I can best encapsulate the solution as... " keep the milk and Bin the fluoride." Sadly there are less than a handful of MPs and ministers who have even a rudimentary science degree but they still seem to believe they are equipped to make law on our behalf.