Cavity Creeps Are Trying to Kill MPs

Have you ever seen a Commie with a glass of water?

Opposition to the fluoridation of water is a bit of a joke here in the US, where after a bunch of nutty Birchers opposed it as a Communist mind-control plot in the ’50s it was instituted across the country with few serious adverse effects. In fact, despite the fact that hardly anyone in this nation has decent health care, our teeth are, on the whole, in pretty good shape! Can you say the same of Australia? Who knows. They probably file their teeth down to sharp points out there anyway, right? In order to tie down kangaroos and crack open their Fosters Oil Cans? (Just kidding! We know Australians don’t actually drink that swill. They are all drunk on Wallaby blood.) But whatever is going on with the teeth out there in that vast, criminal, Texas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, they do not want any fluoride in their water that they probably never touch anyway, like sailors.

In fact “anti-fluoride extremists” are sending death threats to members of parliament! Victorian Labor Minister Lisa Neville received a “death threat [that] was left with a bottle of water” on her verandah (lah dee dah!) on Saturday night, and activists have also “threatened to blow up Barwon Water’s treatment plants….”

According to the Brisbane Times:

A death threat was scrawled on a Barwon Water bottle left on the front verandah of Ms Neville’s Geelong home on Saturday that read: “Thanks for the poison bitch, ready to kill you slowly”.

Despite this “health terrorism,” the fluoridation of water in Geelong, outside of Melbourne, began yesterday. And already, children are probably dying, right? Either dying or suffering from the dreaded fluorosis! That is the most common adverse effect of fluoridated water. It is little white streaks on the teeth.

Now of course there is actually legitimate debate about the ethics of water fluoridation, as it’s a rather classic case of “the common good” against “individual freedoms,” and water fluoridation is not at all necessary in regions with good access to quality dental care (like in most of Continental Europe), but for the most part, anti-fluoridation activists are not particularly interested in having this serious public debate about science and ethics, they are much more interested in pretending that the effects of massive overexposure to fluoride—which causes some nasty problems—are relevant in discussions of the safety of low-level fluoridation.

That is, a minority of shrill conspiracy theorists has seized on one pet villain and uses selective and just plain wrong interpretations of the actual science to hijack an important public health debate. It’s just like autism, and everything else. Just drink bottled water, guys!

At least it is difficult to find celebrities who endorse it. Maybe Oprah can track some down? Oh, wait, good, there’s one guy on HuffPo who throws in a gratuitous “Google Fluoride for the THE TRUTH [from a right-wing British paper]” comment in an article about how you should only drink raw natural mountain spring water. Hey, guy, there is naturally occurring cancerous fluoride in that mountain spring water!