For the past three weeks, I’ve traveled with college students from universities in California and Phnom Penh on a medical education mission throughout Cambodia. We visited universities, public and private hospitals, clinics and group gatherings of hundreds of people throughout rural Cambodia. Our purpose was public health education for Cambodians while understanding the situation of health care among farmers and plantation workers.
Our group of sixteen university students traveled with a psychiatrist and a dentist. At each stop, including a rural site near Sihanoukville, and in Kompong Cham, Kompong Thom, Battambang and Pursat, we saw hundreds of villagers and farmers with their children seeking medical help for various conditions.
We distributed over several thousand bars of soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste, reading material and dark glasses.
As our university students gave short lectures on preventative medicine to hundreds of Cambodians, I handed out small packets of crayons to the children. And with each crayon package, I asked to see their smile in return. What I saw in the rural areas, in so many cases, was beautiful children with many rotting teeth. I would refer them to our dentist on site who would then have no choice but to pull these teeth…sometimes up to eight teeth per child.
What happens to these children with rotting baby teeth? Their adult teeth will emerge in an environment of oral decay and become infected as well. Tooth decay leads to serious infections that can impact the brain and joints. It is no laughing matter.
When I returned to Phnom Penh and met the children of my Cambodian colleagues, all with college degrees, I saw beautiful children with bright smiles full of healthy teeth. Education makes a difference.
What rural Cambodians need is a massive effort at the public school level to educate children about the importance of brushing teeth. Western style candy has become a huge problem creating tooth decay in small children. Adults also need education about oral hygiene, basically the harm of too much candy and not enough brushing teeth. I urge the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports to take up this task of keeping Cambodia’s sweet smile.
Teri Yamada is the chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at CSU Long Beach.