NASW news and features

The nation’s sad state of oral health often gets short shrift in the mainstream press. In Teeth: the Story of Beauty, Inequality and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, Mary Otto explores economic disparities in dental care, the connection between tooth decay and diminished job prospects, the continuing fake debate over the value of water fluoridation, the ethics of cosmetic dentistry, and more. Having focused her reporting on such issues for more than a decade, Otto serves as oral health topic leader for the Association of Health Care Journalists, for which she writes a weekly blog.

What procedures, drugs, foods, environmental exposures, and everyday practices can help or harm your children in pregnancy, birth, and the first years of life? What can you do to protect your children’s health and development? In Dirt Is Good, Jack Gilbert, Rob Knight, and NASW member Sandra Blakeslee provide a parent-friendly guide to the human microbiome — the community of mostly friendly microbes that populate the human body. The Q&A format gives parents quick access to their most pressing questions, and, Blakeslee reports, streamlined the writing process.