Dental danger: Spotlight on the need for better access to oral care
This entry was posted on 12/6/2007 10:12 AM and is filed under ARTICLES.
PEORIA, Ill. -
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 said. "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," said 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 Bishop's colleagues in dentistry were still dealing with a documented dental-related death that had occurred just a month earlier.
Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver of Prince George's County, Md., died after bacteria from an untreated abscessed tooth spread to his brain. . .
