KPLU Local News
(2003-05-14)
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Federal health officials say there's a silent epidemic in the United States of tooth decay. Children in low-income areas, where there's limited access to dentists, are especially hard hit.
Children in Low-Income Areas Hit Hard by Tooth Decay
Kids in San Diego's South Bay have a particularly high rate of tooth decay. But a community clinic in San Ysidro is trying to improve the picture. As KPBS Health Reporter Kenny Goldberg explains, they're using both treatment and prevention.
A few miles from the hills of Tijuana, just across the trolley tracks, lies the San Ysidro Health Center.
Inside one of the Center's low-profile buildings, a receptionist talks to a woman who's brought her child to see the dentist for the first time.
Terry Whitaker is the Center's director of resource development. He shows a visitor the dental clinic.
Whitaker: This is a 12-chair facility that we've recently renovated to bring it up to modern standards, and you can kind of see that the d cor is quite nice .
And so is the equipment. Each room has its own x-ray unit and other tools of the trade. The clinic even has its own state-of-the-art dental lab.
Whitaker: It's very comprehensive as far as dental centers go. We can pretty much do anything from preventive work, through the basic restorations: fillings, root canals, crown and bridge, and full upper and lower dentures or partials.
The San Ysidro dental clinic provides a unique resource in this community. Most of the residents here are on Medi-Cal, or have no insurance at all. But the clinic will treat anyone, regardless of their ability to pay.
That's important to this primarily Latino population, to whom access to dental care is extremely limited.
Ed Martinez: For Latino population they have financial problems and barriers, but I think of equal significance is the language barrier.
Ed Martinez is CEO of the San Ysidro Health Center.
Martinez: Many Latino parents prefer to speak in Spanish. And if they cannot go to a provider that speaks their language, and to a provider who is not familiar with the culture where the patients come from, they just will not feel comfortable going to that provider.
But that's not the case here, where virtually all of the staff is bi-lingual.
Including the clinic director, Dr. Sergio Cuevas. He was born in East Los Angeles, and spent part of his childhood in Mexico. He can identify with local families who know little about taking care of their teeth.
Cuevas: I was also a child that was never taught how to brush, how to floss. I was never taken to a dentist. My teeth started falling out in pieces. So I'm basically an individual who has been there. Now I know different, and here I am to teach the community.
And the community needs some instruction. The Clinic recently surveyed 2,000 South Bay children under the age of five. It found nearly seven out of ten had untreated tooth decay. Almost ten percent had a dozen or more cavities.
To turn things around, Cuevas is trying to get Latino families to buck a long-standing cultural practice putting a child to sleep with a bottle in its mouth.
Cuevas: If you have a bottle in a child's mouth, and they have a tooth present, what happens is that, we have this acid bath in the mouth all night long, de-mineralizing the hard surface of the teeth, and causing severe decay.
Cuevas says baby bottle tooth decay is a major problem among Latino children. He makes a point of cautioning mothers against the practice whenever they bring their kids in.
Cuevas: When we are seeing one child we look around to see what the other children are doing. Some of them come in, that they are two, three years of age and they still have a bottle in their mouth. So not only are we treating the child who's in the chair, but we're also advising the parent of the damage that we're doing to the children as we're feeding them past the age of the first tooth, which is about eight months or so.
Cuevas and other staff are spreading the word outside the clinic, too. Three days a week, dental assistants and outreach workers visit local nutrition centers. They talk to mothers about the importance of bringing their kids in for a check up.
The clinic has also launched a special outreach program aimed at pregnant women. It's part of a five-year research project supervised by UC San Francisco. The goal is to try and change mothers' behavior with their infants.
Ed Martinez says these kinds of prevention efforts are a good investment.
Martinez: We're actually building it into our regular program service, cause we understand and appreciate the fact that we could reduce our expenses in the treatment area, by investing more in prevention. It does take a while for you to see the outcome, but it does work.
Martinez says the clinic is raising awareness about the importance of oral health in the South Bay. It's hoped through their efforts, local kids can be spared a lifetime of dental disease.
- Kenny Goldberg, KPBS News.
You can contact Kenny Goldberg at kgoldberg@kpbs.org. © Copyright 2012, KPBS
