Pitts NB, Evans DJ, Nugent ZJ. The dental caries experience of 12-year-old children in the United Kingdom. Surveys coordinated by the British Association for the Study of Community Dentistry in 1996/1997. Community Dent Hlth. 1998; 15:(1)49-54
The Vine Trust's Amazon Hope Project is a medical and dental programme providing healthcare to communities along the Amazon River in Peru. Volunteers from the UK and other countries work alongside Peruvian staff employed by their partner organization, Union Biblica del Peru, to provide a health service from a boat which serves communities on several tributaries who otherwise would have no other access to care. The dental programme involves a basic restorative and extraction service, with scope to develop a preventive programme.
Clinical Relevance: Dentists' and DCPs' skills are transferable globally: this article illustrates how one volunteer dental project is working to provide relevant and sustainable dental health care in the Amazon jungle.
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The Peruvian Amazon basin is an area covering over 140,000 square miles in the north of the country. In the region of Loreto lies Iquitos, the capital of the Peruvian jungle. It has a population of about 600,000 and is only accessible by air or river (Figure 1). Iquitos is a huge river port on the Amazon connecting Peru with the Atlantic Ocean nearly 3000 km away. Many tributaries flow into the river system in this area, and it is along some of these tributaries that a pair of small refurbished UK naval tenders sail, providing medical and dental care to a remote population of around 100,000 people.
The boats were donated to a Scottish charity called ‘The Vine Trust’ (SC017386, www.vinetrust.org), a charity which seeks to enable volunteers to make a real and significant difference to some of the poorest communities in the world, building the capacity of local partners to meet local needs in the areas of children, enterprise and healthcare.
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