It is said that half of the Chinese didn't brush their teeth 20 years ago. Now the situation has changed. Statistic shows that 85% of the population cleans their mouth every day!

The Third National Oral Hygiene Spot Check was finished recently with a result of the average middle-aged citizen lacking 3 teeth, every senior citizen lacking 11 teeth and 6.8% of the old folks have no teeth at all.

The Spot Check took place in Guangdong in September 2005 covering 3000 citizens within the province. The result turned out to be a bit scary. Tooth decay had affected 60% to 70% of Guangdong people. The average was two cavities per person!

Situations for the children and senior citizens were worse. For the 5-year-old kids, every 100 of them have as many as 410 cavities in total; for the 70-year-old elders, 74.17% of them have tooth decay and each of them has 3.37 cavities. The result is not optimistic for the 40-year-olds, 63.89% of these middle-aged people have tooth decay and each of them has 1.99 cavities.

(by Carrot Chan, Kimberly Batreau)