PREVALENCE OF DENTAL CARIES AMONG PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN IN BASRAH

This paper reports the results of a survey carried out in 27 primary schools covering 1580 children randomly drawn from these schools. The aim was to determine the prevalence rate of dental carries among these children. On the basis of examination, children were classified into those with dental carries (regardless of the number of teeth involved) and those without dental caries. The prevalence rate was 41.2% with significantly higher rate among boys (44.9%) as compared to girls (37.6%). The prevalence rate tended to decrease with increasing age and was much related to the lack of dental hygiene as indicated by the habit of tooth brushing. INTRODUCTION he school age is regarded as the most important phase of childhood life during which the child enters the society training system and emerges as a contributing member of the community. If the child doesn’t maintain adequate health , the benefits of education will be lost because of absenteeism or lack of attention due to ill health. [1] School plays a very important role in health education and promotion at the crucial stage of childhood and adolescence. It develops personal character, skills, attitude, and physique, in addition to imparting knowledge. Parents, teachers, administrators, students and health professionals must be informed to develop core values, visions , goals and activities, and to provide new direction for health education and promotion of optimal school learning and school health. Increasingly, schools are used as health access site for students to receive increased and improved access to care that they are not adequately receiving elsewhere. School health services are defined as “The procedures used by physicians, dentists, nurses, teachers, etc, that are designed to appraise, protect, and promote optimum health of students and school personnel. ’’ through planned programmes. The overall objective of the school health programme is to ensure that every child is as healthy as possible so that he can obtain the full benefit from his education. [5] The importance of providing health services to students is widely recognized. Not only do school health services provide health care to students who otherwise might not have access to care, but because all children abilities to succeed academically and socially are linked to their physical and mental health. School provision of health services is related to the educational mission of school. [6] In practical life, an educated person is likely to behave in a much better way to care for health and a healthy person is likely to have better academic performance. School health services are preventive services, health education, emergency care, referral and management of acute and chronic health condition. [7] There are number of core screening, diagnostic, treatment and health counseling services that every school should provide and most schools already do provide. These include management of medical emergencies, medication delivery, services for children with special health care needs, referral of common health problems (such as injury, asthma, behavioural and emotional difficulties) and health screening such as vision and hearing screening. [8] A programme with expanded health services may provide for example on site immunization, full health histories and physical examination or on site therapy for children with special mental health needs. Dental care is one important component of school health services as it was clearly stated in the Iraqi Public Health Law No.89 of 1981. Prevailing impressions, supported by some empirical evidence from previous studies, is that school health services in general and dental care in particular are failing to respond to the expected commitments. [9] This part of the study is an attempt to explore the extent of dental caries among primary school children in Basrah. T MJBU, VOL 23, No. 2, 2005 27 METHODOLOGY This paper is part of a comprehensive schoolbased study carried out in Basrah governorate on environmental, health and academic performance of primary schools and primary school children. The details of the methodology used can be found elsewhere. [10] In brief, 27 primary schools were randomly drawn from a list of all primary schools in Basrah governorate. Then from each school 60 children were randomly selected from the first, third and sixth classes and were fully interviewed and examined. The dental examination was made by one of the investigators after adequate training by dentists. The final sample covered 1580 children.