WHO’s Global Oral Health Status Report 2022: Actions, discussion and implementation

Objectives
In November 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the first Global Oral Health Status Report (GOHSR) that describes the status of oral health care in the 195 member states. In the present editorial, we summarize the key findings of the GOHSR report and discuss the successes and pitfalls of the suggested remedy strategies.

Materials and methods
The WHO GOHSR report that is available online was used to summarize and discuss in the present editorial.

Results
The report highlights that globally close to 3.5 billion people suffer from oral diseases, with South-East Asian and Western Pacific countries having the highest caseloads. Key issues that have led to the unproportionally high-rise in the caseloads include political, socio-economic, familial, and historical experiences of the communities, ever-growing power and sophistication of targeted commercial advertisements, negligent attitude of the policy planners and insurance companies, and lack of funding in oral health research and instrumentalization of proper surveillance tools.

Conclusions
Global strategies for improving dental health needs to be tailored for each country given the logistical and financial challenges with self-care and regular dental hygiene proving to be the most effective factors in preventing dental diseases.