By Anne Kim
JUNE 7, 2018
About 43 percent of rural Americans lack access to dental care, according to the National Rural Health Association, and West Virginia, among the poorest and most rural states, is at the center of the crisis. All but six of the state’s 55 counties include federally designated “Health Professional Shortage Areas,” “Medically Underserved Areas” or both. The state’s Oral Health Program found in 2014 and 2015 that nearly half of counties had fewer than six practicing dentists, just half of adult West Virginians had visited a dentist in the previous year, and more than one-fifth hadn’t seen a dentist in five years. By comparison, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study in 2015 found that 64 percent of all American adults ages 18 to 64 reported seeing a dentist in the previous year. The rate of total tooth loss is 33.8 percent among West Virginians over 65, compared with roughly 19 percent for all seniors nationally.
“As the numbers of people with 
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