The Conservative Party's Manifesto 2019 and WF
There is no mention of WF in the 2019 Manifesto. There is a sentence which contains the words "health inequalities" but this not refer to oral health.
The Dental Profession is in a crisis at the moment (summer 2021) due to many dentists going out of business or retiring or becoming private dentists. This means that many Dental School students cannot find clinical placements. This has a knock-on effect for the number of students who can be accepted at Dental School.
Has the Government been persuaded to opt for universal nationwide WF in order to provide a stop-gap intervention and is that why they have included WF in the Health and Care Bill 2021?
This seems to say that "we have to do something even though we didn't include this in our Manifesto."
Because there are less NHS Dentists, parents will be finding it difficult to take their children for a check-up. Since England does not encourage dental nurses and dentists to visit schools so that the children can be examined during class-time, there really is no other solution to strategy for the prevention or early detection of decay.
It is puzzling that the Government does not propose school examinations. There has been no such problem in Scotland and Wales: both countries have hand-on dental health interventions which treat children as individuals. Not so the English Government which seems to favour a universal intervention which is ineffectual and which toxifies all those who drink fluoridated water.
STOP PRESS (27.08.22): We're patiently waiting for the results of the Catfish research study (West Cumbria) which seems to have gone to ground in the deepest recesses of the DHSC. A Freedom of Information request returned a startling response a few days ago: "we're still waiting for the research to be peer-reviewed!" Startling, because our most recent information had been that it was somewhere in the DHSC awaiting formatting following a completed peer review.
Such reluctance to publish the results leads us to believe that dental decay before and after West Cumbria became re-fluoridated has neither increased nor decreased. If that is the case, then there can be no justification for attempting to fluoridate England.
