We have added a new indicator: “bad teeth per person” (you find it under “health” in the Gapminder World).
Here we have plotted “bad teeth per person” against “income per person”. Is dental problems worst in the richest or the poorest countries? There actually seem to be a tendency for the dental problems to be larger in the middle income countries, while the population in the richest and poorest countries have somewhat better teeth.
“Bad teeth per person” show how many decayed, missing or filled teeth an average 12 year old has in each country. The technical term of the indicator is DFMT for 12-years old and the data is taken from the WHO. We have unfortunatly only data for one year. Note that the data in many cases are actually based on estimates for earlier years.
There are some interesting discussions concerning this indicator over at Chris Blattman’s blog as well as at the meaningfullness of little things.
We added links to two blogs discussing this data, see above.
I saw a sceptical voice over at Chris Blattman’s blog.
I must say that I am also a bit sceptical to to the data, if this means that the average swede should just have one bad tooth. That would imply that great many would have non during a lifetime. I find it surprising even taken the youth effect, into account. I think 2-4 is closer to the general impression.
It would be interesting to see a histogram as a verification.
//Ola
Ola,
thanks for your comment. You made us realise that the naming of the indicator were quite misleading. The indicator actually measure the teeth of 12-year old children, not the population at large. This is a standardized way of measuring the dental health in a country.
We have changed the indicator name to “Bad teeth per child (12 yr)”, which is hopefully less misleading. Of course, there are many remaining uncertainties with the data.
If your wonder about the exact definition of any indicator you can always try to hold the cursor over the indicator name, which will make a “tool tip” appear, where details of the indicator is described. You can also click the small icons next to the axis, which will open a new page with further information.
Mattias / Gapminder
We are happy that you discuss the data we publish! Of course, there are always quality issues with this kind of global data.
Regarding the dental health of Swedish 12-year old children. This report here (sorry, in Swedish) shows that in 2005, the average DFT (Decayed and Filled Teeth) of 12-year olds was estimated to be 1.1 (table 3 on page 16) and that the percentage of 12-year olds without caries was 58% (table 2 on page 15).
However, in table 4 on page 16 you can see that average DFT for 19-year olds was 3.1 in 2005.
How do I get the file/presentation to open? I read above the Swedish young people were #1, do they use flouride? Is this info on a slide when I get it to open?
Thanks!
Hi “TLS”,
If you experience problems opening the presentation/link,
don’t hesitate to contact me:
daniel.lapidus at gapminder.org (IT developer, Gapminder)
Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible (if there are any error messages etc.) so that we can help you and, at the same time, other users.
Best regards.
Daniel
Do you have sugar consumption data? It would be interesting to relate the DMFT (bad teeth) to per capita sugar consumption
Hi Shlomo,
Thanks for your suggestion. We will see if we can find some data on sugar consumption. We post a blog-post when we find something.
Mattias – Gapminder
Nice best information
In one of my posts I said we hope to apply DRM on a programme by programme basis as soon as we can. So we would hope most BBC programmes would be clear of protection and only those where the rights holder required copy and distribution protection would have it applied