Principal Investigator
Project Description
Oral diseases are among the most common chronic diseases experienced by adults and children. Left untreated, they can result in pain, tooth loss, and quality of life declines such as difficulty eating and speaking, which in turn can lead to nutritional deficits, difficulty socializing and lost school and work days. While the morbidity associated with oral diseases can easily be mitigated through good daily self-care, knowledge and performance of daily self-care is often suboptimal in resource poor areas. Furthermore, oral diseases can impact a broad array of medical outcomes, but they are often excluded from health policy frameworks and poorly funded. It is therefore vital that oral disease prevention and management is integrated into public health and infrastructure decisions at all levels. The goal of this planning proposal, which builds on an existing collaborative established through the PGIF-funded, “Children’s Global Oral Health Initiative,” is to bring together stakeholders from Kenya and Brazil, both of which have increasing rates of oral diseases, and unequal access to care, to lay the groundwork needed to develop a comprehensive framework for oral health policy, prevention and management in low and middle-income nations. We will work with the Global Centers in Nairobi and Rio de Janeiro to bring together academic, research, policy and clinical partners who will use community-participatory methods to develop a cross-national learning laboratory which will be used to leverage expertise, develop collaborative oral health policy, planning and funding targets, and bring visibility to oral health needs. We anticipate that this work will be critical to informing oral health policy and programming in other low and middle income countries with similar needs, and we will explore the possibility of expanding the work to additional Global Centers including Mumbai and Amman.
