Oral Health Surveys England
For 5-year-olds, the surveys take place every two years. The most recent was 2019. We believe that it is this OhS which is going to be used as justification for making future WF proposals to fluoridate an area.
Unfortunately, the 2019 OHS was heavily flawed:
- Local Authorities failed to give the examining team from PHE permission to visit primary schools
- Where permission was given, parents did not give permission for their child to be examined, or the child refused to be examined at the 11th hour.
In very many cases, the results of the examination to detect dental decay was statistically insignificant because:
of the absence of many schools and areas from the survey, e.g. Southampton, and
the examined sample was less than the protocol for the survey, i.e. less than 250 children were examined. Sheffield is a case in point where only 243 5-year-olds reported for examination.
We also have a doubt about the selection of the schools and whether that would have introduced bias. Schools in disadvantaged areas would have more children with dental decay than schools in more affluent areas. If only schools in disadvantaged areas were visited, then the number of children with decay would be artificially skewed. That is, more children would have decay and that produces a shock statistic of, say, 40% for Sheffield.
The other factor which is overlooked by the media when they publish shocking dental decay statistics is the occurrence of early childgood decay, variously called incisor decay or baby-bottle decay. This type of decay is not indicative of failure to teach young children to clean their teeth under supervision. it's more indicative of swamping the young toddler's mouth with sugar which the chuld sucks from a baby bottle for hours at a time. The upper incisors rapidly decay. Indeed the decay is so rapid that even with the presence of industrially sourced fluoride in the drinking water, incisor decay still occurs. Looking at Sheffield again, of the 243 children examined, 20% had incisor decay and 40% of the 243 children had decay overall. Unless health visitors and oral health specialists get to grips with this type of decay, all area of England and Wales, whether fluoridated or not will have "shocking" dentak decay statistics.
So, using Sheffield again as a baseline for this discussion:
243 children were examined. 40% had dental decay = 97 children
20% of the children examined had incisor decay
