| OCR Text |
Show DENTAL HYGIENE Child Dental Hygiene Changed Greatly as Result of School Study WALPOLE, Mass. In the schools here, they have added a new element ele-ment to the traditional three R's, readin', 'riting, and 'rithmetic. The fourth item is brushing. Brushing the teeth has become a carefully controlled, carefully recorded daily event, as the children lend themselves them-selves to a study that may bring about a major change in child dental hygiene. Every afternoon school session in the past two years has had a period devoted to supervised super-vised brushing of the teeth. The Walpole studies 'have been carried on by the Tufts College Dental School in Boston. Dr. Helmut A. Zander, professor of dentistry at Tufts, chose the town (population (popula-tion 9,000) because it offered the opportunity to study the dental problems of children in two schools representing similar home environment. environ-ment. In some cases, different children chil-dren were enrolled from one family in each of the two elementary schools. His purpose was to note the effect of penicillin when applied ap-plied locally as a dentifrice. Following three years of laboratory labora-tory study and experiments, Dr. Zander's research staff had settled on penicillin as an effective control con-trol fnr rlpntal r-arips (VnvitipsV They had eliminated several hundred hun-dred chemical compounds during their experiments. WALPOLE SCHOOL and health authorities cooperated with the Tufts hygienists, dividing 400 youngsters young-sters into two groups, one in each elementary school. Their ages ranged from 5-14 years. Each child brushed his teeth regualrly following follow-ing a course of instruction on the proper method for brushing teeth under classroom supervision. One group used a tooth powder containing penicillin, and known as dentocillin. The other group used the same tooth powder, without the added penicillin. Both groups were given dental examinations at frequent intervals. The children who used the tooth powder with the added penicillin showed a reduction in tooth decay of 55.3 per cent at the end of the first year. At the end of the second year of the study, the same group had 53.8 per cent fewer cavities than the children who used the tooth powder only, without the penicillin peni-cillin formula. Information on these studies has been requested by school administrators adminis-trators in many areas of the country, coun-try, as the statistics developed. To study the possibility of penicillin peni-cillin sensitivity or induced resist-ence resist-ence to the penicillin ingredient, research was conducted by the Tufts dental hygienists on more than 4,000 ' adults. No serious reactions re-actions were noted, even in people with known sensitivity to penicillin in other forms. |
