Oral Health – Are you making an informed decision?

For parents of a new born baby, there is always a lot of advice from a multitude of sources on what is best for baby. One topic that is sometimes forgotten is oral health until the infant starts on solids and teeth begin to appear. 

Oral health is a social issue in New Zealand despite the Ministry of Health’s programme providing free dental facilities for all children from one year until the eighteenth birthday.  Oral health can potentially have an impacting effect on baby’s quality of life.

Therefore, oral health is an interesting topic to investigate why children’s oral health is declining in New Zealand.  Fluoridation of the drinking water supplies has become topical with various reports in the Herald News. 

I find this topic of interest as when I was young; we lined up each morning for a fluoride tablet after brushing our teeth because we lived in a rural location with un-fluoridated water supplies.  Despite enduring the fluoride tablets daily and having a very healthy diet with no junk foods, I still ended up with fillings in seven of my twenty primary teeth.   Yet my eleven year old son reared in Napier with un-fluoridated water (which I have recently become aware of) and no fluoride protection except toothpaste and a healthy diet has just lost his twentieth cavity free primary tooth and currently all his secondary teeth are filling free.