Health professionals in New Hampshire are taking a new look at the most neglected body part: the mouth.As the U.S. surgeon general said in the nation's first-ever report on oral health, the mouth is an early warning system, signaling trouble in other parts of the body. If your mouth isn't healthy, neither is your body.

The way we practice medicine has contributed to a division between oral health and overall health for children. Dentists do the former, pediatricians and family practitioners the latter.

If there were enough dentists to go around, there would be no problem, but there aren't. In New Hampshire, a third of our dentists are over 55 years old, and the number of dentists in the state is projected to decline. The result is that many children have not received the care they need to prevent oral disease.

We can do better. We know the solutions, and they are affordable.

One way to prevent oral disease and tooth decay is to fluoridate the water. In New Hampshire, fewer than half our residents who are served by municipal water supplies benefit from fluoridation. Per person, community water fluoridation is far less expensive than the cost of a single filling. In some communities without a public water supply, preventive treatments such as sealants and fluoride supplements are even more important to ensure the health of children.

We need to increase the odds that all children will get the early prevention and treatment they need to grow up healthy and disease-free. Children can't be healthy without good oral health.

This fact has driven physicians out of the comfort of their own practices and into the unfamiliar realm of community coalition-building. We have raised our voices for New Hampshire's children to make the case for better oral health programs and policies.

That's why you will see more physicians, nurses and other public health professionals signing on to the new Watch Your Mouth campaign in months to come. And that's why you may see your child return from a visit to the pediatrician's office with a Watch Your Mouth button or temporary tattoo. We want to enlist you in securing the kinds of community programs and policies that will ensure the oral health of all New Hampshire's children.

Every day, we see children in our offices who suffer from asthma. But tooth decay is now five times more common than asthma, making it the most common chronic childhood disease in America.

If we want healthy children, physicians and dentists are going to have to join parents and community leaders who are ready to use their mouths to speak up for the health of all children in our state.

It's a safe bet that good public policies for children won't happen unless we speak up. That leads to another folk saying that has equal relevance here: Put your money where your mouth is.

(Dr. Suzanne Boulter is a pediatrician in Concord who practices at the Capital Region Health Center and teaches at the Dartmouth Family Practice Residency Program. You can reach the Watch Your Mouth campaign headquarters at 1-866-WYMOUTH.)

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By SUZANNE BOULTER

For the Monitor