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Hull targeted for latest fluoridation offensive

there are three sorts of liars, the common or garden liar ... the damnable liar who is fortunately rather a [rare bird] in decent society, and lastly the expert (The Accountant (2), 1886)

Doug Cross, 1st February 2015

So, now Public Health England (PHE) has turned its malignant eye towards the East. targeting the good citizens of Hull, and especially their young children, for its latest public medical assault. Councillors have been galvanised into a frenzy of alarm by the revelation that ’43.4% of the five year old children in Hull have bad teeth’.

Mildly numerate Councillors and members of the public amongst you will look at that 43.4% and say, “Gosh - that’s really, really bad. And they must be right, if they can measure the extent of this rampant epidemic of rotten teeth to as close as a tenth of one percent. That’s accurate to one kid in a thousand, that is! Such precision must mean that it’s correct.”

And so they are encouraged to ‘Do Something About It.’ Like, put fluoride in the water supply. Welcome to the corrupt world of statistical malpractice!

You’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you now, but you Councillors in Hull need to wake up to some rather worrying news. No - not that your kids have bad teeth - some of them do, wherever you live.

The bad news is that governments mainly use numbers to deceive, not to educate you, and that’s what’s going on here, with this latest outburst of dental hand-wringing. In the latest report on children’s dental health, issued by Public Health England in March last year, the level of deliberate deception in this already controversial field of public health plummets to new depths of depravity.

To put it simply, the figures that they are throwing around now are, for over half of the Local Authority areas in England, completely worthless. Oh sure, you can check how many kids in your area do have bad teeth, and you can say what the average is. But unless you check every child in the City, then what you get is not the truth: it’s a guess.

And the smaller the proportion of kids you look at, the wilder that guess becomes. (And I won’t even begin to discuss what sort of average you should be using anyway - I’ll leave that little nugget for another time!)

So you need to ask yourselves, just how wild is this guess? The answer appears in a document produced by the NHS a couple of years back. This contains an enormous spreadsheet, tabling the figures for dental decay in 5 year olds in all the Lower Tier Local Authorities in England.

In it, you’ll discover that that Hull’s 43.4% is only the middle point of the ‘real’ answer. In fact the proportion of their 5 year olds with bad teeth could be anywhere between around 37% and 50%. So they could be a lot better, or even quite a bit worse - but how can you tell?

Well, suppose that. like PHE, you ask if your kids’ teeth really are the worst in the region? To answer that you have to look at the same spread of guesses about all the other 20 Local Authority areas in the Yorkshire and the Humber region. If any of them overlap at all then it’s not possible to tell, with a releiable degree of reality, whether kids in those other areas are better or worse than your own kids’ teeth. And the NHS data appear to show that in 11 of those areas the kids’ teeth seem to be a bit better, and in the others they’re not.

But hang on - there’s a problem. You see, to make those guesses the people who check your kids’ teeth for the NHS have to look at enough of them to get information that is meaningful. If they didn’t examine enough kids then the guesses are worthless. And guess what - the examiners didn’t look at enough kids in Hull to make a scientifically meaningful guess in the first place!

Unfortunately, inconvenient evidence can spoil a good story, so the NHS people doing the original study put a brave face on it and just carried on regardless. They ignored their own instructions that at least 250 kids needed to be examined (and many more if the results were to be used to devise dental health policy) and only looked at 219.

Well, that’s close enough, isn’t it? No - if the evidence wasn’t collected in the same way, then it’s inadmissible - it’s like comparing apples and oranges. And if 250 kids aren’t enough to even make a reasonable guess on how many bad teeth the kids have, how many more do you need to look at to make sure that any actual policy you impose - like fluoridation, for instance - is scientifically and medically justifed? (It’s over a thousand. actually - and that has an ENORMOUS effect on this whole charade, as I shall be discussing later!)

So, good Councillors of Hull - you‘ve been conned! There is actually no acceptable evidence whatever to show that your 5 year olds have the worst teeth in the region. They may or may not have, but this magic figure of 43.4% is a complete fabrication, and neither PHE nor you know what the real figure should be, and so whether there’s a big problem or not.

In fact, both the NHS Survey and that PHE Report are brim-full of statistical naughtiness. I don’t know how much it’s costing the health budget to mess around with these useless surveys, but I’m sure a Freedom eof Information request might unravel some interesting information. But when we’ve Major Incidents’ popping up at hospitals around the country bcause the NHS funding is in crisis, I do wonder whether there’s some scope here for saving money on more urgent stuff.

It looks suspiciously like the main purpose of doing these dodgy surveys is propping up the government’s obsession with fluoridating our drinking water. After all, the NHS surveys were originally done by a private sector group with a r4ather close relationship with the British Fluoridation Society. Coincidence, do you think?

The real costs of fluoridation to the public, as opposed to the public sector, are a closely guarded State secret. But you’d never suspect that, if you just go by PHE’s bland dismissal of the true extent and impacts of dental fluorosis in its Report. Well, not until it’s too late for the infants of Hull, if this mass medication fraud goes ahead - they’ll only begin to realise just what has happened to them some time around 2020 to 2025.

For some more comment on this fraud, including a passing mention to Hull, see the web page "From Hull and Hell and PHE, Good Lord deliver us!" (Apologies to Hull Council, but I couldn't resist it!)