Dr Damian Wojcik's Presentation to Whangarei District Council On Water Fluoridation, Sept 28, 2023

Whangarei District Council Public Forum, 28 Sept, 2023. Presentation by Dr Damian Wojcik, General Practitioner, Whangarei. “Water Fluoridation in New Zealand; a Counter view”.
Speaker’s notes.
Slide 1: My name is Damian Wojcik; I am a General practitioner, a clinical metal toxicologist, a
specialist in nutrition and environmental medicine, & a forensic physician.
The purpose of this very brief 5 mins presentation is to give a short overview about
why I have formed a scientific opinion against community water fluoridation, (CWF). I
appreciate that there are 2 sides to every debate, and in the ring with me there are some
formidable heavyweight opponents; you cannot get heavier than Dr Peter Gluckman, MD,
who supports CWF. My view is a minority counter opinion.
Slide 2: Throughout medical school & my subsequent House Surgeon years, I had no reason to
question the Ministry of Health & the Dentistry position on water fluoridation as a
community good. In 1980 on a Friday morning for 6 months, I gave dental general
anaesthetics at Kaitaia hospital, so that the dental surgeon could extract severely curious
teeth, with black & brown stumps, where beautiful white teeth should have been. Clearly
the problem was too much sugar, but fluoridation seemed to be the answer. However, my
opinion slowly changed, and there were several reasons for this.
In the 1990s, I worked with the local dentist, Laurie Brett BDS, with several patients in
common. He told me that he had to repeat his final year at Dental School after writing a
research project questioning the benefits of fluoridation. I would like to publicly acknowledge the way he quietly shared fluoride science with me, and his courage in bringing the same to the wider public forum.
I read Christopher Bryson's book, "The Fluoride Deception," containing detailed references
in the history of water fluoridation in the US going back to the 1949 Manhattan Project, and some notable fluoride environmental disasters.
I became aware of Dr John Colquhoun's remarkable situation. He was the Dental Officer of
Health for Auckland district, and set off overseas on a world tour to gather information and
science with which to fluoridate the remaining regions in NZ where there was no community water fluoridation. However, when he returned he was totally opposed & publicly acknowledged the harm he had previously done by adding fluoride to water. He tried to redress this, & I believe remains as a remarkable example of scientific integrity in the history of New Zealand CWF. Of course, he became an embarrassment to his superiors and entered a premature retirement.
Slide 3: I listened to Professor of Chemistry Paul Connett's detailed presentation in Whangarei
against CWF, and I could not fault his logic or science. Some years later I worked with Declan Waugh, an eminent environmental scientist in Ireland, on a fluoride & toxic metals civil litigation case. (Email: [email protected] for all notes.)