Silicofluorides, widely used in water fluoridation, are unlicensed medicinal substances, administered to large populations without informed consent or supervision by a qualified medical practitioner. Fluoridation fails the test of reliability and specificity, and, lacking toxicity testing of silicofluorides, constitutes unlawful medical research. It is banned in most of Europe; European Union human rights legislation makes it illegal. Silicofluorides have never been submitted to the U.S. FDA for approval as medicines. The ethical validity of fluoridation policy does not stand up to scrutiny relative to the Nuremberg Code and other codes of medical ethics, including the Council of Europe's Biomedical Convention of 1999. The police power of the State has been used in the United States to override health concerns, with the support of the courts, which have given deference to health authorities.
An unhealthy obsession with fluorideABSTRACT. Justification for a state policy on water fluoridation is found in the authoritarian approach to public health. The strategies employed to choose interventions are consistent with strictly utilitarian determinants that in practice rely on inadequate risk cost-benefit analysis, inflating the perceived benefits to the State whilst ignoring private sector costs when the socioeconomic benefits to the State and the community are judged to justify abrogation of individual rights. This promotes reliance on the concept of proportionality in public health interventions, obstructing appropriate review of the ethical acceptability and legitimacy of water fluoridation. It is proposed that the underlying drive to retain fluoridation is mainly directed at preserving the power base of the dental profession; its persistence is reliant on collusion between the legislature itself and its regulatory and implementing agencies, and the tactics employed to maintain the status quo are everywhere dependent on a legal fiction, as well as on scientific fraud and deliberate misrepresentation. It appears, then, that the objective is to persuade key public sector influence groups to recruit the lay public's support through the engineering of misinformed consent to the practice. This new cross-disciplinary analysis examines the underlying ethical and legal issues raised by fluoridation, and the role of the public sector and professional elites in manipulating the judiciary and State (including local authorities) to endorse the preservation of the expiring fluoridation paradigm.
The demand for expertise in forensic ecology is expanding as environmental legislation proliferates. Many regulatory authorities have failed to keep pace, leading to weaknesses in enforcement that need to be addressed by increased professional training. Consequently, forensic expertise is in demand by defendants in criminal cases where public sector prosecutions alleging environmental pollution rely on inadequate or inadmissible evidence. Ecologists are also active in auditing compliance of projects and programs with local, national, and international legal frameworks, and play a central role in ensuring that the codes of practice of international lenders are enforced and liability avoided. In this field, circumstantial evidence, often with relatively poor provenance, is used to develop data salvage programs that generate a contextual understanding of an incident, with an emphasis on ecological processes. Where corrupt organizations oppose evidence collection by professionals, communities may employ unorthodox techniques such as community epidemiology to collect and collate data and pressurize the authorities by disseminating the results through the media. Such methods have resulted in dramatic successes in exposing serious toxicological damage within communities, especially in the face of political subversion of more conventional techniques of forensic evidence collection.
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