Photo Credit: WHO/Tom Vierus

Oral diseases, while largely preventable, pose a significant global health burden and affect people throughout their life course, causing physical symptoms, functional limitations and detrimental impacts on emotional, mental and social well-being. The burden of oral diseases is high in the Region, affecting more than 800 million people (42.1% of the population) in 2019, which highlights the need for action to prevent and control oral diseases.

WHO’s Global oral health status report (GOHSR) provides the first-ever comprehensive picture of oral disease burden and highlights challenges and opportunities to accelerate progress towards universal coverage for oral health. This includes introducing oral health profiles of countries based on the latest available data from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and global WHO surveys. It emphasizes the global impact of oral disease on our health and well-being and highlights stark inequalities, with a higher disease burden for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged population groups within and across societies. The data in this oral health data portal is from the country profiles of the GOHSR based on the Member States of the WHO Western Pacific Region.