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In October 2013 a team of a dentist and two dental nurses from West London Dental Centres travelled to Lake Inle in Burma (Myanmar), as the first volunteers for the British registered charity, Burmadent. We were able to help many hundreds of children who had extremely poor teeth, often suffering with multiple abscesses and pain. As well as undertaking large numbers of extractions, we also gave some dental health education to the teachers, and applied fluoride to the teeth of many hundreds of children.We are continuing our efforts to help these gentle communities, and have returned each year- twice in 2017-  returning to Lake Inle, where we have been delighted to find that children from the local Monastic orphanage seen on the first trip had much healthier mouths when we visited again, so we were then able to visit more additional orphanages, treating children as young as 2 years old on table tops. In total to date we have already treated thousands of patients, who otherwise would still be living in daily pain, with no access to dental care. Since the first trip we have visited communities around Yangon, Shan state and in 2017 twice visited a remote lakeside monastic school of 1200 students, in addition joined the most influential head of dentistry in the country, travelling to villages around Naypyidaw that had not seen a dentist in 15 years! We were also able to spend some time teaching colleagues in his charity hospital in the capital city, Naypyidaw.

Our passion to help these patients remains as strong as ever. We are now planning our next trip from our practice and will return to Burma for two weeks in January 2019, as part of a larger Burmadent team of four dentists and four dental nurses. This is an expedition in collaboration with a medical charity, Medical Action Myanmar (an offshoot of Medicine Sans Frontiere, when we plan to provide urgent dental care to the poorest communities in Karen state. It is extremely remote, and we will not have any of the normal home comforts that we take for granted back in the UK. Whilst there we are also planning to train local doctors to undertake basic urgent dental care for a population that currently has absolutely no access to any dentistry, and to provide them with dental health education.  At the end of the trip we intend to leave behind our instruments and supplies for the use by the remaining doctors.

We simply could not undertake this project without the help of our patients, friends, families and businesses. We would like to thank everyone for their generosity for previous trips as for each volunteer, the cost of flights, vaccinations, modest accommodation and living expenses is approximately £2500. On behalf of my team, may I please ask you to support us on our next trip, and all donations however large or small are greatly appreciated. I hope to write regular diary updates during the trip ( but due to the remoteness there will not be any internet of course!) so If you would like to be included on our emailing list, please send an email to the practice.

Thank you once again!

Lesley Naismith, Sharon Bierer, Dr Henrik Overgaard-Nielson, Dr Josie Jones, Dr Leslie Kai-Lin Leong (from Australia!), Mrs Lisa Molaie & Ms Khaing Hla Hla and Dr Mike Clarke

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