Australia’s Airborne Dentist

Australians living or traveling in rural and remote areas can face particular difficulties when they need medical care. Hundreds of kilometres from major cities and many hours by road from the closest hospital or clinic, some rural Australians do not have easy access to doctors, nurses and dentists.

Organisations such as the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) have been established to bring health services to outback Australian communities. The RFDs provides free medical care to people who live, work or travel in remote and regional parts of Australia.This non-profit organisation is the oldest and largest airborne health service of its kind in the world, and since 1928 it has used small aircraft to send doctors and nurses to some of Australia's most far-away communities.

In recent years, the RFDS has also started to fly dentists to regional Australia. As well as offering mobile dental clinics, the RFDS offers a range of preventative and educational services. Looking after the teeth of people in remote areas presents special challenges. These include providing care to disparate communities with no established dental facilities, and dealing with higher incidences of other diseases which are linked to, or caused by poor dental health.

People in remote areas have very infrequent visits by health staff. RFDS dentists might only visit a community once every few months, or sometimes once per year. Because of infrequent dentist visits, patients in these areas often need to put up with their dental problems before they can get treatment: consequently, people in remote areas are more likely to have tooth decay (the blackening and deterioration of teeth) and develop gum and other mouth diseases.

In some locations that the RFDS visits, there are no suitable dental facilities, so dentists have to bring everything with them. This includes drills, dentists' chairs, portable X-ray machines, and computers for keeping track of patients' treatments. Equipment can weigh up to 100 kilograms, and since the small planes that transport dentists have limited space, dentists cannot always bring everything that they need.While dentists in town or city centres can specialise in certain types of treatment, RFDS dentists need to be all-rounders'. They need to be able to do all kinds of dental procedures, as they don't have the ability to refer patients to more specialised dentists. Even with their broad experience, there are some services that are particularly challenging for RFDS dentists. For example, dentures (or artificial can be very difficult to provide, as they need to be the right shape and size for the patient, and requires many visits over a long period of time. As a result it is not practical to make dentures available.

Some chronic illnesses are more common in remote communities that in the rest ofAustralia These pesses can in turn lead to a lowered resistance to infection, includinggum and other diral infections As a result, people in outback Australian communities are more likely to experience oral health problems than city folk, and this poses extra challenges for both the dentists and the doctors of the RFDS.

Because there aren't a lot of dental services in remote areas, people living in these areas also receive less education about good dental hygiene than their city counterparts do. Australians in very remote communities might not be aware of things that people in cities take for granted, such as the importance of daily tooth brushing. Also, basic dental hygiene items such as toothpaste and toothbrushes can be more expensive in outback areas. Many people are on low incomes, meaning they have extra difficulty affording these products. If this is the case, the RFDS supplies these. As well as treating patients, RFDS dentists try to focus on preventative oral health and educate their patients on good oral hygiene, such as tooth brushing and flossing. The RFDS also provides mouthguards for young sports players. Playing contact sports, such as rugby league or Australian rules football, can damage young people's teeth, so mouthguards provide protection which prevents accidental injuries.

Adding fluoride to water supplies has been proven to reduce the incidence of tooth decay in many parts of the world. City dwellers in Australia use water supplies that have been fluoridated, and their rates of tooth decay are lower because of this. In remote areas, it is not practical to fluoridate drinking water supplies, and so people living in these areas are more subject to tooth decay. As a result, it is particularly important that people living in areas without fluoridated water pay special attention to regular brushing of their teeth with fluoridated toothpaste.

Despite many challenges, the RFDS continues to offer much-needed dental and medical support. Its presence in isolated communities greatly improves the quality of dental health, and supports important oral hygiene and health initiatives.

The history of the Celtic language

[A] November 1897, in a field near the village of Coligny in eastern France, a local inhabitant unearthed two strange objects. One was an imposing statue of Mars, the Roman god of war. The other was an ancient bronze tablet. 1.5 metres wide and 1 metre high. It bore numerals in Roman but the words were in Gaulish, a version of the Celtic language spoken by the inhabitants of France before the Roman conquest in the first century BC. The tablet turned out to be one of the most important sources of words from this extinct language.

[B] Two researchers, geneticist Dr Peter Forster and linguist Dr Alfred Toth, have now used the calendar and other Celtic inscriptions to reconstruct the history of Celtic and its position in the Indo-European family of languages. They say that Celtic became a language in its own right and entered the British Isles much earlier than supposed. Then in the first century BC, the Romans defeated the Celts, both in France and in Britain, so decisively that their language. Latin, and its successor languages displaced Celtic over much of its former territory. In the British Isles, Celtic speakers survived in two main groups. the Goidelic branch of Celtic which includes Irish and Scots Gaelic, and the Brythonic branch, formed mainly of Welsh and Breton, a Celtic tongue carried to Brittany in France by emigrants from Cornwall.

[C] Because languages change so fast, historical linguists have little faith in language trees that go back more than a fey thousand years. Dr Forster has developed a new method for relating a group of languages, basing it on the tree-drawing techniques used to trace the evolutionary relationships among genes. The meted will work on just a handful of words, a fortunate circumstance since only some 30 Gaulish words have known counterparts in all the other languages under study. Dr Forster and Dr Toth have wed the method to draw up a tree relating the different branches of Celtic to one another and to other Indo-European languages like English, French, Spanish, Latin and Greek. In a published article, they say that soon after the ancestral Indo-European language arrived in Europe over 5,000 years ago. It split into different branches leading to Celtic, Latin, Greek and English. Within Celtic their tree shows that Gaulish-the mainland European version of the language separated from its Goidelic and Brythonic cousins, much as might be expected from the facts of geography.

[D] The researchers' method even dates the points at which their language tree divides, although the dates have a wide range of possibility. They calculate that the Indo-European language initially fragmented in Europe around 8100 BC, plus or minus 1,900 years, and the divergence between the mainland European and British versions of Gaelic took place in 3200 BC, plus or minus 1,500 years. These dates are much earlier than previously estimated. The traditional date of the Indo-European fragmentation has been 4000 BC for some time, said linguist Dr Merit Ruhlen. He said the new method seems pretty reasonable' and should be useful in tracing back the earlier history of the Indo-European language.

[E] Specialists have long debated which country was the homeland of the Indo-Europeans and whether their language was spread by conquest or because its speakers were the first agriculturists methods and tongue were adopted by other populations. The second theory, that it was spread by agriculture, has been advocated by archaeologist Dr Colin Renfrew. Dr Forster, who works with Dr Renfrew, said in an interview that the suggested date 8100 BC for the arrival of Indo-European in Europe does seem to vindicate Renfrew's archaeological idea that the Indo-European languages were spread by farmers. Agriculture started to arrive in Europe from the near around 6000 BC, earlier than the traditional date proposed by linguists for the spread of Indo-European This put with the lower end of Dr Forster's range of dates.

[F] Forster sad that his estimated date of 3200 BC for the afval of Celtic speakers in the British much earlier than the usual date, 600 BC posited on the basis of archaeological evidence Jean Dr Toth said their method of evaluating groups of languages against each other was similar to historical linguists, many of whom restrict the research to how words only one single language have changed over time. Asked what linguists thought of his approach he said: To be honest,they don't understand it most of them. They don't even know what I'm talking about." The method used by Dr Forster and Dr Toth has two parts. One is to draw a tree on the basis of carefully chosen words: the second is to date the splits in the tree by calibrating them with own historical This is similar to the way geneticists date their evolutionary trees by tying one or more branch branch points to known dates from the fossil record.

[G] April McMahon, a linguist at the University of Sheffield in England, said that Dr Forster's method "seems to me to be a good start', and that it was reasonable to base a language family tree on just a handful of well-chosen words. She had less confidence in the dating method, she said because language changes in an irregular way based on social factors like the size of the speaker's group and degree of contact with others.