Bauer, Irmgard L. (2025) Putting the mouth back in the body – the neglected area of dental and oral travel health. Tropical Diseases, Travel Medicine and Vaccines, 11. 7.

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Abstract

The lack of dental travel health care has been deplored for some time. Travel medicine’s remit is to prepare people for travel. People travel with their mouth firmly in their body, yet the mouth’s wellbeing does not rate a mention. This article represents the first exploration of a range of topics relevant to an until now neglected, yet potentially highly important, area of health care. A range of dental mishaps can occur while away from home, from simple toothache to accidents, serious emergencies, or restoration failures. Other problems originate in unwise behaviour, including holiday-inspired body modifications.

Unless there is pain, teeth are typically not thought about much. However, examining the practical side of dental hygiene during travels, several overlooked and perhaps surprising topics emerge that – through the travel lens – take on a different and important role: the oral microbiome, toothbrush hygiene, the toilet plume, and traveller diarrhoea. Based on this discussion, recommendations are made for clinical practice, education, and further research.

The historical chasm between dentistry and medicine, despite long-standing calls for change, does not seem to go away and impairs holistic high quality travel health care. Travel medicine can bypass this unproductive division. It has the unique opportunity to be the first medical specialty cooperating closely with dentists to bridge this gap by providing quality travel health care to travellers with all their body parts attached.

Item ID:	84899
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2055-0936
Keywords:	Dental care, toothbrush contamination, toilet plume, traveller diarrhoea, dentistry vs. medicine, oral piercings, tooth jewellery, disease prevention, quality health care
Copyright Information:	Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2024.
Date Deposited:	18 Mar 2025 03:22
FoR Codes:	32 BIOMEDICAL AND CLINICAL SCIENCES > 3203 Dentistry > 320399 Dentistry not elsewhere classified @ 20% 42 HEALTH SCIENCES > 4206 Public health > 420605 Preventative health care @ 50% 42 HEALTH SCIENCES > 4205 Nursing > 420599 Nursing not elsewhere classified @ 30%
SEO Codes:	20 HEALTH > 2004 Public health (excl. specific population health) > 200402 Dental health @ 100%
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