On November 10, MPs voted by 284 to 181 to empower unelected and unaccountable strategic health authorities to order water companies to dump fluoride in our water supplies.

In so doing, they have demolished the right of every UK citizen - a right very clearly enshrined in European and International laws - to control what we put into our own bodies.

Under the 1946 Water Act, water engineers may only add substances to public water supplies for the purposes of making the water safe for consumption.

However, the purpose of adding fluoride - more precisely the industrial waste product hexafluorisilisic acid, a proscribed poison - to our water is to prevent childhood tooth decay.

This also violates European law by neither being registered as a medicine nor having been officially safety tested.

Even the Government's own York Review (2000) found a "highly questionable" benefit to just 14.6 per cent of children but an average of 48 per cent of people in existing fluoridated areas suffering from dental fluorosis, a dental disfigurement recognised by scientists worldwide as the first sign of chronic fluoride poisoning.

The Republic of Ireland - the only remaining European country to poison all its citizens in this way - rates only average in the European league of dental health tables.

Local MPs Des Turner and Ivor Caplin voted to allow this measure, thereby showing they have either no grasp or no respect for individual rights.

The National Pure Water Association is launching a legal challenge to this. It has every chance of success as this measure breaks many existing laws and conventions.

-Graham Parfitt, Brighton