The 'smoking gun' behind deprived kids' bad teeth.

Doug Cross    www.ukcaf.org    Dated 28th December 2015

Kids from deprived backgrounds, we are told by Public Health England (PHE), have worse dental decay, and fluoridation will help cure it. If you're still persuaded that PHE's busy little propagandists know what they are talking about, here's a couple of interesting items that you may have missed, because they certainly have. So let's just take a quick look at this 'deprivation' issue.

First deprivation doesn't cause poor health. It's associated with it, sure, but deprivation is a relative thing - deprived compared with who else? But there are things going on in deprived areas that are different from more affluent areas. One of them is smoking. It's much more common amongst people living in these so-called 'deprived' communities. It's partly down to personality and psychological attitude - “Everyone else does, so I may as well!” - and partly down to a rather weird ''neighbourhood effect' associated with poorer housing and other physical influences of these run-down districts. 

But then, on top of that, if there is a smoker in the house then more babies in these communities are exposed to passive smoke. And if they breath in this 'passive' smoke during the time between birth and three months of age, they develop around twice as much dental decay later as kids brought up in a smoke-free home.

That's right - just breathing the fumes as a baby doubles the risk of getting bad teeth later, as a young kid. So the poor smoke more than the rich, their kids breath the smoke, and then they get more tooth decay. .This provides a credible alternative explanation - a confounding factor - for the very real increase in dental decay in kids from deprived communities.

But that decay isn't down to their being 'deprived' - it's a far more complex sociological problem, that has nothing to do with whether or not there's any fluoride in their drinking water. Only an idiot or an obsessive would claim that dribbling this toxic substance into the public water supply could possibly stop poor parents smoking at home!

If you're interested, check these out -

Pickett KM, Pearl M.(2001) Multilevel analyses of neighbourhood socioeconomic context and health outcomes: a critical review. J Epidemiol Community Health 2001;55:111–122
Tanaka S. et al(2015) Secondhand smoke and incidence of dental caries in deciduous teeth among children in Japan: population based retrospective cohort study BMJ 2015; 351:h5397 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h5397

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