Fluoridation is based on the belief that ingested fluoride can reduce tooth decay. Modern science disproved that theory - that belief. Fluoride makes outer enamel harder topically only - making it wasteful and unscientific to add fluoride chemicals into the drinking water - especially when there is no evidence that any resident of Margaret River is fluoride-deficient. With all the fluoride that's in the environment and dental products that wasn't there when fluoridation was born in the 1940's, no one has ever bothered to see if adding the fluoride will actually cause more harm than any possible benefit.

Health departments around Australia are not noted for conducting 'genuine' consultations about fluoridation. They already know the outcome they want. Recently in Geelong, Victoria four public consultations were conducted. About 99 to one of the attendees said they did not want fluoridation, and gave very good reasons. They also asked difficult questions about adverse health effects and about human rights, and the department officials gave quite poor, uninformed answers. Yet the department made an announcement some weeks later that fluoridation was to go ahead, "after having consulted the community". In other words the consutlation was a sham, window dressing only. The medical problems now understood with fluoride ingestion are well laid out on the website www.fluoridealert.org which is a site run by scientists and dentists (those who dont tow the official party line on the matter). Fluoride from fluoridated water is now implicated in causing severe toxic sensitivity reactions in a proportion of consumers, causing harm to thyroid glands, damaging bone structure after some years or decades of constant ingestion, and now the USA national Kidney Foundation has announced that fluoridated water is not safe for consumption by chronic kidney disease patients. In case you didnt know, Australia has an enormous number of such patients. The people of Margaret River had better move heaven and earth to get the department to run genuine consultation and actually listen to what the people want. An excellent speaker on the downside of fluoridation, for public meetings, would be the highly respected former Australian Dental Association president from South Australia, Dr Andrew Harms. On the website mentioned above you can find an international petition of scientists to End Fluoridation, signed by thousands, including a hundred or so Australian doctors and health science people. Move cautiously on this one!

Drinking fluoride does NOT prevent cavities. Here are exerpts from 3 peer- reviewed articles. Featherstone JDB. Prevention and reversal of dental caries: role of low level fluoride. Community Dent Oral Epidemiol. 27:31-40, 1999 The level of fluoride incorporated into dental mineral by systemic ingestion is insufficient to play a significant role in caries prevention. ****************************** J Am Dent Assoc, Vol 131, No 7, 887-899. © 2000 The American Dental Association THE SCIENCE AND PRACTICE OF CARIES PREVENTION The fluoride incorporated developmentally—that is, systemically into the normal tooth mineral—is insufficient to have a measurable effect on acid solubility. ****************************** Clin Oral Invest (2007) DOI 10.1007/s00784-007-01 0111-61- Community water fluoridation and caries prevention: a critical review On the other hand, the level of fluoride incorporated into enamel by systemic ingestion was proved to have no significant effect in prevent preventing/reversing caries [ 11]. Moreover, the reexamination of clinical/epidemiologal data from early and recent CWF studies supported the current view that the cariostatatic effect of fluoride is almost exclusively posteruptive and the mechanism of action is topical [12, 15, 23]