Children’s bad teeth – level 3
"A few weeks ago, I had to take out all the baby teeth from a two-year-old child and that was heartbreaking, really heartbreaking. We're a team that's worked together for a long time but, the atmosphere in the theater, we were all in silence."
And it's a whole generation of children with teeth like these that are being removed, often leading to a lifetime of dental problems.
"Cavities, ‘exposured’ nerves, abscesses..."
"And how young children are you seeing this in?"
"From the age of 3. And this is going to affect the child for the rest of their lives."
Removing baby teeth often leads to adult ones coming through crowded, meaning yet more chance of decay. New figures show at a cycle that more and more children are being caught in. Children's rotting teeth is costing the NHS 35 million pounds a year, up more than 60% from 5 years ago. As many as 14,000 children aged 5 and under needed to have teeth removed in 1 year.
Caitlin is just one of these children. She needs to have 6 teeth removed. Her mother said she feels let down because she thought she was giving her healthy food.
"I was told off because I gave her too much fruit, which I thought was healthy, with sugar-free juice, and fruit snacks. It makes me feel ashamed in a way because I think people probably think, ‘oh, she's been eating too many sweets, so you've not been looking after her teeth.’"
"We've seen much more processed food, much more drinking of fizzy drinks and drinks that purport to be healthy but actually have large amounts of sugar in them. And what we're saying is that parents need the information to be able to make really informed choices."
The hope is that with greater information will come better dental habits and end to a generation of young children requiring such extreme dental work.
Difficult words: exposured – exposed (unprotected), abscess (a swollen area of the body), decay (going bad), NHS (National Health Service), tell off (to criticize), fizzy (with bubbles of gas), purport (to say without evidence).