PATRICK FLANAGAN,
Sir, - As a member of the Forum on Fluoridation whose Report was published this week, may I express my dismay at the alacrity with which Mr John Gormley TD dismissed the report as a "whitewash." How he can make such a criticism of a volume of over 280 pages, without having studied it, beggars belief. The very length of the document is an indication of the efforts made by forum members to collect, collate and analyse all relevant information - for and against fluoridation - before arriving at the numerous recommendations in the report.
It is surely not too much for the forum members to hope that people with an interest in or concern about fluoridation (and there are very many) would reserve judgment until they had considered the evidence and arguments on which the recommendations are based. Those who have read the report are then in a position to comment or criticise in any way they choose, and I unreservedly recognise their right to do so.
It is disheartening that a public representative should make such a hasty and untenable judgment on a document, one of whose primary aims is to inform the concerned public and to reassure them as to the safety of fluoridation on the basis of rigorously assessed, current scientific data from national and international sources. - Yours, etc.,
PATRICK FLANAGAN,
Churchtown,
Dublin 14.