A local scare and a Maryland death spotlight the need for better access to oral care.
BY PAM ADAMS
of the Journal Star
Initial reports about a Peoria County Jail inmate dying of gum disease quite naturally upset more people than the inmate's family.
Peoria periodontist Dr. Chris Couri remembers five or six patients showing him copies of the newspaper story. "People were shocked," he says. "Nobody thinks I'm going to die from an abscess."
Subsequent tests found the 25-year-old inmate died of complications other than gum disease - the combined effects of an undiagnosed cancer and an infection - something Dr. Sue Bishop suspected all along.
"I read the stories, too," says Dr. Bishop, dental director of the Peoria City/County Health Department. "The microorganism (mentioned) is not an organism of the mouth."
The inmate, Jeremy Baksai, died last March. Many of Dr. Bishop's colleagues in dentistry were still dealing with a documented dental-related death that had occurred just a month earlier.
'A national disgrace'
Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver of Prince George's County, Md., died after bacteria from an untreated abscessed tooth spread to his brain. Shortly before he died, his mother had lost Medicaid coverage for her children because of a bureaucratic snafu. The situation was compounded by the family's stay in a homeless shelter and the inability to find available, accessible oral care.
A Washington Post story compared the cost of a routine tooth extraction, $80, which might have saved the boy's life, to the approximate $200,000 it ultimately cost for hospitalization, emergency brain surgery and subsequent therapies.
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Full Article:
http://www.pjstar.com/stories/112807/HEA_BF1RMRF7.019.php
