Calgary’s City Council voted on Tuesday to end the fluoridation of our water. Idiots.
Calgary removing fluoride from water supply
Not surprisingly, actual experts on health are not happy, including Dr. Richard Musto, Calgary’s medical officer of health. However, the small but vocal group of wing-nuts who have been lobbying council to remove fluoride since it was introduced by plebiscite in 1989 apparently won over most of the morons in council this time around, mostly on the notion that it is immoral to force the entire population to be “medicated” with this “poison.”
One of the nice little ironies of all this for me, of course, is that we will still be getting fluoridated water after the city stops adding it to the supply. According to the City’s website, “Fluoride naturally occurs in the Bow and Elbow Rivers, in concentrations varying throughout the year, between 0.1 and 0.4 mg/L.” That’s less than the .7 mg/L the City’s water treatment plants have standardized at, but now I’m wondering if the anti-fluoride lobby will start demanding a massive and expensive de-fluoridating upgrade at the plants to protect us from levels that have been in the water since before people ever settled here.
It simply boggles my mind that lobby groups like this can force this kind of thing on the rest of us using a combination of misinformation, disinformation and unsubstantiated fear. And even worse, that our politicians will go along with it, even in the face of a whole mess of expert testimony that clearly demonstrates that the lobbists are wrong. I also have to say that I’m disappointed in our new mayor for staying far away from the whole debate and choosing not to provide some sober, rational leadership on this subject, which is kinda why we voted him into that position in the first place.
I’m already hearing whsipers that this change for Calgary will be used by other anti-fluoride protestors as proof of their cause, for why would a major metropoloitan area like Calgary drop water fluoridation unless it was the most horribly bad thing ever? It pains me to know that our council’s bad example will probably result in other bad decisions being made in the future. Such is the circle of life…