Oral Health Atlas maps out global dental trends
Singapore: On Wednesday 2 September, the FDI World Dental Federation launched the Oral Health Atlas at the 2009 World Dental Congress. The Oral Health Atlas illustrates oral health globally, highlights oral health as a neglected area of health for individuals and health systems, and suggests realistic individual and population-wide solutions. The atlas uniquely combines short texts, colourful maps, photographs and graphics with complex statistics and facts in an intuitive, easy-to-understand visual format.
Authored by Habib Bezian, Roby Beaglehole, Jon Crail and Judith Mackay, the atlas presents trends in oral health worldwide and the widespread impact of factors such as tobacco use, fluoride, sugar consumption and socio-economic conditions.
“The Oral Health Atlas is one of the FDI’s major accomplishments this year,” said Dr David Alexander, FDI Executive Director. The atlas is one in a series of health atlases that covers topics such as cancer, tobacco and sexual health. “The atlas takes an awful lot of very boring tabular data published in black and white in scholarly journals and turns it into graphic images and world maps. It makes oral health and the disparities in oral health very clear to all, making it a great tool for advocacy,” Dr Alexander added.
“One of my favourite maps in the atlas looks oral health advocacy and integration (page 63),” said Dr Habib Benzian. For him, this is a unique presentation of content that lists all the oral health advocacy activities that have taken place over the past decade which contributed to raising oral health to a new level. “It places oral health into the bigger context of international health by listing landmark declarations and political decisions. It is also the first time a direct link has been made between oral health and the UN Millennium Development Goals,” Dr Benzian said.
The Oral Health Atlas can be purchased online via
Amazon