Mary Otto is a former Washington Post Reporter and winner of the 2010 Gies Award for Outstanding Achievement for her reporting on dental care for the poor, she is now on sabbatical authoring a book on the subject. She served as Editor-in-Chief for Street Sense from 2008 – 2014.
If you want to know how tough someone’s life has been, look inside his mouth. Teeth are made of the hardest substance in the human body. But poverty, neglect and disease can crack them, break them, ruin them. The patients at the SOME dental clinic on O Street NW have been through a lot. Their teeth tell the story.
The Deamonte Driver Dental Project was real. It was here. Yet the job of bringing adequate dental care to the poor children of Prince George's County would not be a simple one. State and national public-health officials have been grappling with the same challenges: to educate both poor people and dentists; to address the historic breach between oral health care and the rest of health care; to confront the vast gaps in the dental public-health system.
