NEWS ITEMS.

Franklin Times, Volume 9, Issue 721, 7 April 1922, Page 9

NEWS ITEMS.

A CLEAN MOUTH. If people lived in a hygienic way on proper food, took sufficient exercise, and used other physiological measures, like animals, the secretions of the mouth would be so powerful in their disinfecting agency as to prevent the growth of all forms of fungi and micro organisms. But, as a matter of fact, people are not healthy at the start oi so careful of food and exorcise as to be in this ideal condition. Consequently, mouths are rare in which there arc not* foul secretions from the mucous glands, decaying tooth structures; dead epithelial scales, exposed and decomposing pulps, ulcerous mucous membrane, gum tissue and periosteum, food debris about the necks of the teeth between the adjacent surfaces and crowded into fissures, sulci and carious cavities of the crowns. • One well-known writer on microorganisms in the human mouth has isolated over one hundred cultivatabie varieties of fungi from the mouth. A writer tells about having devehv-md as many as eighty thousand colonies from one-sixth cubic centimetres of spittle, obtained by rinsing the mouth with fifteen cubic centimetres of sterilised water, this at the end of four hours after clehnsing the mouth thoroughly with 1 waxed floss silk and toothbrush,’ and one hour after using fifteen cubic centimetres of a one to two hundred solution of a forty per cent, solution of formaldehyde gas in waTr as a mouth wash.

This, of course, was very unusual. Of course, the swallowing of food anci drink, and of the saliva itself, carry immense numbers of fungi from tnc mouth to the remainder of the alimentary canal every twenty four hours. No doubt some of these are capable of mischief-making in the intestines.