Investing in oral health: Here’s why the time is now

What would you guess is the most common noncommunicable disease worldwide? If you guessed cancer or cardiovascular disease, you’d be wrong – but you wouldn’t be alone.

Almost half the world’s population – 3.5 billion people – are impacted by oral diseases that not only imperil their ability to eat or speak but also put them at greater risk of and from other systemic illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, stroke and some cancers. The resulting cost to the global economy is staggering, estimated at more than $710 billion for treatment costs plus productivity losses combined.

In comparison, oral health programmes focused on prevention are highly impactful at low cost. Yet, until recently, oral health has largely been neglected by the public and private sectors and the broader global health agenda.

Following a growing global consensus on the importance of oral health to overall health, a tipping point came in 2022 with the adoption of the World Health Organization’s landmark global strategy on oral health and the release of its global oral health status report, which highlights the cost of this neglect – and the starkly higher burden it imposes on socio-economically disadvantaged and underrepresented populations.

More recently, the FDI World Dental Federation, representing over 1 million dentists worldwide and 191 national dental associations in 134 countries, adopted a new vision calling for integrating oral health into primary care and including dental care in universal health coverage policies.

Yet despite this growing recognition of the importance of oral health, access to care remains tragically constrained by governments’ lack of investment in dental facilities, the dental workforce and ensuring the affordability of needed care, compounded by employers’ lack of investment in employee oral health.

Largely the result of the historic siloing of oral health and medicine, these investment choices have made it impossible to stem the tide of oral disease and keep people healthy.

The World Economic Forum Global Health Equity Network’s Oral Health Affinity Group is working to help change this. Composed of leaders across sectors and industries, we are committed to raising awareness of the costs of poor oral health to individuals, communities, businesses and nations.

Of prime importance to this group is the collective exploration of actions that governments and private sector companies can take to advance global oral health.

The Economic Rationale for a Global Commitment to Invest in Oral Health is the Forum’s first publication aimed at catalyzing prompt action by the public and private sectors. It makes plain the enormous costs we pay individually, as a society and globally for poor oral health.

Lost school and work days, lower academic achievement, and diminished job prospects for adults are some impacts – penalties that are most pronounced for low-income, vulnerable populations make oral health a clear health equity priority. Also felt are diminished labour productivity, with losses stemming from dental diseases similar to those for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

On the flip side, better oral health benefits individuals and communities improves productivity, lowers acute healthcare spending and creates healthcare cost savings among populations with concomitant noncommunicable diseases.

There are already leaders showcasing how investing in oral health can benefit communities, economies and broader society. For example, Thailand, Japan and Brazil are a vanguard in adopting universal public health insurance schemes and including oral health benefits in that coverage.

As a result, an estimated 70% of Brazilians now access healthcare services yearly with significant improvements in oral health indicators, including dramatic reductions in tooth loss due to dental disease.

In Japan, because dental care service delivery is now also integrated into the broader healthcare delivery model, dentists work cooperatively with other healthcare professionals to improve the care of patients with certain medical conditions such as diabetes and dementia, help identify patients with these diseases and administer appropriate care to prevent disease progression.

In the United States, Medicaid expansion in some states to provide dental care coverage for adults has resulted in reducing patients’ risk of being diagnosed with diabetes and heart disease, which reduced costs to the Medicaid programme. The expansion also reduced both emergency room spending and inpatient healthcare costs.

The bottom line: we can’t afford not to invest in oral health. That’s why we call on governments to take a key role in improving oral health, including:

There is also an important opportunity for private-sector employers to help expand access to care by

Vitally, each sector cannot work in silos and we must join efforts through innovative public-private partnerships to create lasting change. Only if we come together to make the necessary investments in oral health will we achieve substantially improved global access to preventive oral care, a reduced burden of noncommunicable diseases and ultimately, a healthier world.