Which country has the best teeth in the world?

We have added a new indicator: “bad teeth per person” (you find it under “health” in the Gapminder World).

Here we have plotted “bad teeth per person” against “income per person”. Is dental problems worst in the richest or the poorest countries? There actually seem to be a tendency for the dental problems to be larger in the middle income countries, while the population in the richest and poorest countries have somewhat better teeth.

“Bad teeth per person” show how many decayed, missing or filled teeth an average 12 year old has in each country. The technical term of the indicator is DFMT for 12-years old and the data is taken from the WHO. We have unfortunatly only data for one year. Note that the data in many cases are actually based on estimates for earlier years.

There are some interesting discussions concerning this indicator over at Chris Blattman’s blog as well as at  the meaningfullness of little things.