Council Tax to pay for poisoned water
Local Authorities in England are about to be dragged into a minefield of public anger and litigation over the controversial practice of water fluoridation. Environmental analyst Doug Cross is warning Councils that in the coming months they will be dragged into a storm of protests from the public that will dwarf all past battles over the dental profession’s irrational obsession with fluoride.
The dental profession has long wanted to force Councils to support this discredited practice, that a recent European Commission Scientific Committee has damned as 'A crude measure of systemic fluoride treatment . . . without a detectable threshold for dental and bone damage’.
If the Health and Social Care Bill due to be nodded through Parliament next week is approved, then promoters of fluoridation will at last have convinced a gullible Parliament to force Councils to pander to their senseless fixation. Dentists claim to this is a legitimate public health trade-off, but Doug argues that there can be no justification for compulsory medication that damages many children for life, on the spurious pretext that it might reduce tooth decay in a few.
Regardless of the public’s overwhelming rejection of fluoridation, the government appears determined to force this bill through Parliament, obliging Councils to take responsibility for this deeply resented practice. Cross is calling for Councils to collaborate on mounting a Judicial Review of all fluoridation legislation in the UK. He claims that it is incompatible with both EC and the English legislation on medicinal products and food. He says that the disfiguration caused by dental fluorosis amounts to degrading treatment, and is in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
If he is right, then a Court decision supporting his challenge here in the UK would have enormous influence in the world-wide movement to abolish what he describes as ‘State-sponsored child abuse’.
His call to Councils for action can be downloaded from
Doug has written widely on the incompatibilities of fluoridation law with the principles of medicinal law, medical ethics and human rights, and his analyses are available from
Note for Editors
Doug is a Director of UK Councils Against Fluoridation Ltd, a not-for-profit company providing information and advice to Local Authorities in the UK, Australia, Canada, and the USA. UKCAF was founded by his partner, professional artist Liz Vaughan, in 1988, and has been a leading influence with councils in preventing the imposition of fluoridation in the North West and Northern Ireland. At present around 74 Councils are affiliated to UKCAF.
Doug has a long record of international successes as a senior Environmental Analyst and Mission Leader for International Development Agencies and Consultancy consortia. For the past ten years he has been a member of the Lowermoor Sub-Group of the government’s Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (CoT), investigating the effects of the 1988 Camelford Poisoning, in which the water supply to 20,000 people in North Cornwall was contaminated by aluminium sulphate. He has campaigned for the recognition of the need for appropriate medical monitoring of the North Cornwall community for the past 23 years. He was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Biology in December 2009.
Doug Cross
Address for contact - Croft End, Lowick Bridge, Ulverston, Cumbria LA12 8EE
Tel 01229 885420
Email doug@ukcaf.org
