Australia loses $1 billion each year simply because people have poor oral health.
The pain from dental problems causes people to miss work and children to miss school. All of those losses of productivity result in the extremely high amount of money lost.
There are many people that can’t afford the necessary dental treatment to take care of routine problems. Also, poorer people aren’t a priority for dental treatment in most cases.
The report, called “End of Decay: The cost of poor dental health and what should be done about it,” was compiled by two professors.
There were several interesting revelations from the data, including that one million days of work are lost each year because of oral health problems. Also, 600,000 school days are lost each year for the same reason. Adults on the lowest income level were 60 times more likely to have no teeth than people on the higher end of the spectrum.
The Brotherhood of St. Laurence, which put together the study, wants the government to make quality dental care more readily accessible to poor people.
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