Waikato University student Luke Oldfield was awarded a summer research grant to establish what role vested interests in the natural health industry had played in Hamilton City Council’s fluoride tribunal process. The project is called “Public Integrity and Participatory Democracy: Hamilton City Council’s Water Fluoridation Decision“. This evening he displayed a poster(above) to an audience of academic faculty sharing some preliminary results of his research.

One staggering statistic among these findings was that approximately 2/3 of all written submissions were directly or indirectly provided by parties associated with the ‘natural health’ lobby. No wonder why some anti-fluoridationists didn’t want this research to be done and calling it “bogus research” before results released.
Luke will be using the data to inform a broader discussion about abuse and misuse of democratic process in the provision of public health policy, which is the focus of his Masters dissertation.