Friday, July 25, 2014

Fluoridation Fails: 830,000 dental ER vists

Licensing ‘dental therapists’ could give more Americans the care they need - The Washington Post: IN 2009, 830,000 visits to emergency rooms around the country could have been prevented if the patients had seen a dentist earlier. In 2011, more than half of children on Medicaid went without dental care. These facts lie behind the story of Deamonte Driver, a Prince George’s County seventh-grader who died of a preventable infection that spread from his mouth to his brain in 2007. Maryland pushed through some reforms following Deamonte’s death, but the situation across the country has not dramatically improved.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Buckets of Teeth Pulled in Fluoridated Virginia

Virginia is 95% fluoridated. But "Every year, hundreds of people have every one of their teeth pulled there. Then they put their names into a denture lottery, with the hope of being picked to get a set of false teeth made for them at the next year’s event. Forty-six people were picked from a list of 700 to get dentures this year.
'They pull thousands of teeth here. At the end, they’ll have buckets of teeth,' said volunteer Jennifer Lee, Virginia’s deputy secretary of health and human resources and an emergency room doctor."
'I just had an 18-year-old have a full mouth extraction because she’s never had dental care,' said Beth Bortz, who runs the Virginia Center for Health Innovation. 'It’s not unusual.'”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/at-free-va-health-clinic-mcauliffe-tells-the-poor-hes-working-hard-to-help-them/2014/07/18/cbdc89de-0e7d-11e4-b8e5-d0de80767fc2_story.html?wprss=rss_local

Tuesday, July 01, 2014

90% fluoridated Wisconsinites have dire dental needs

Even though Wisconsin is 90% fluoridated, $7.1 million in free care had to be delivered to 13,000 patients since 2009 who have been priced out of routine dental care   Sixth WDA Mission of Mercy recap:
In just two days during June 2014:
  • 1,218 volunteers, including 217 dentists
  • 1,925 patient visits
  • $1.3 million in donated care
  • 1,889 fillings
  • 1,485 extractions
  • 792 cleanings
  • 573 sealant/fluoride treatments
  • 43 endo procedures (root canals and therapeutic pulpotomies)
  • 149 full and partial dentures