A TOOTHLESS AGE.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLVI, Issue 2645, 14 May 1923, Page 2

A TOOTHLESS AGE.

POSSIBILITY or FUTURE. EFFORTS TO PREVENT IT. Science is now waging a great battle to prevent us becoming a toothless nation. It will be a long war, much more arduous and requiring even more patience than the Great War, but the leaders directing the fight are men who have been up against propositions quite as tough. Everyone who has a child at the public elementary schools is aware ot this national effort to improve the dental condition Of the race, says a Rondon paper. Figures sent in by the local education authorities showed that nearly 70 per cent, of children wore in need of treatment, and this percentage wqs in respect of more than two and a-half million children. Professor Sir Arthur Keith, the eminent anatomist, points out that if we go on living our present highly artificial life wc shall become a nation of more or less toothless people, in the sense, that our teeth will not only be of little use, but a real source of danger. Something is very wrong, and it is to increase our knowledge of the causes of denta) disease that the Medical Research Council appointed a committee of experts who are now working in tire laboratories at untiringexperiments. At the head of this committee is Professor W. D. Halliburton, and under his t chairmanship are eight distinguished scientists, including one lady, Mrs Edward Mellanby. One of the first investigations upon which the experts have been engaged is the structure of our teeth. The enamel, that hard coating that can be burnished with care, has always been a puzzle. Under the microscope this is seen to be built up of prisma. Tests have been applied to the

teeth, not only of men, but of apes and fishes, to find out how these i prisms are formed and exactly how they grow. Thousands of years before men were civilised there Was one man who had' an extremely imperfect tooth, though it looked sound. It was a double tooth found in the skull of a man buried in Neolithic times (about 2000 years before Christ), and Mr».T. HdWard Mummery, the dental investigator, who has been examining the teeth of ancient men, found in this specimen more! numerous imperfections than in any; apparently sound modern teeth he had I examined.

The enamel, for example, was practically Split down the centre, and the defects wore not found until put under the microscope. Wolkhoff, another investigator, found that there was hardly a tooth of civilised man j which did not show some defect., But, ! although Mr Mummery found these, defects, the teeth of this ancient man showed no trace of decay. So it would seem that the ancient Briton, save in exceptional circumsances, did not suffer from toothache. It has been established that “on the I whole badly formed teeth are more susceptible” to disease. If we cannot stop this changing,

shape, with its jumbled-up molar system, what then Are we doomed to a toothless age, or will science master the situation in time?