431. The dark path from childhood in Portugal (part 2 / Conclusion)

Combining the concept of health as defined by the World Health Organization as a state of complete physical, mental and social, not merely the absence of disease, with the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child, we can say that Portugal is a country that is in constant violation of human rights by failing to officially recognize as a disease all the pathologies associated with oral health. In this context, our country runs over the basic rights of children and adolescents who, having no psychological maturity, are neglected by the national health service and cruelty of unpredictable consequences for the rest of their lives.

The politics of contempt made ​​by governments regarding the prevention and treatment of diseases associated with oral health is well illustrated by an absence in Portugal, no mandatory screening of all children and adolescents at the level of dentistry. Moreover, governments will closing oral health services that will still exist in hospitals and health centers, taking advantage of the absence of a specific technique for career dentists, dentists and dental hygienists from within the civil service.

The use of service contracts with private, within the oral health, lately made ​​by governments, shows total inaction by the Ministry of Health and Education in face and resolve the problem by putting public health in the hands of economic interests alone.

We are witnessing the delivery by the government, the responsibilities of oral health to entities that often manifest a clear lack of ethics and never showed interest in making primary prevention, usually associated with or colluding with business groups and multinationals that want to maintain the current landscape in order to ensure customers in the medium and long term.

The consequence of outrages against human dignity committed by the previous and current governments in the context of oral health, with the connivance of organizations directly and indirectly related to oral health, resulting in the worst abuses of the rights and dignity of the human person, in the latter case, are victimized by the system, since it can not choose to be born into a rich and powerful family, with all rights, and a family destitute and poor, who are denied all their rights, since they can not afford them.

While government associations and groups involved in oral health signing up to the current situation, we are daily violating the most elementary rights of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which prevents a very large percentage of them may never have adequate oral health treatments with unpredictable consequences for the rest of their lives.

How long will you continue this atrocious policy of oral health in Portugal? After all, where is the ethics of oral health? The sensitivity for oral health problems, particularly in childhood and adolescence, requires a completely different behavior on the part of the current government and entities connected to the practice of dentistry.

Are they also expected to occur to the suicide of a child or teenager why you were denied oral health care?