Reduction of bacteremia after oral manipulations.

Abstract

POSTOPERATIVE bacteremias have been an established clinical finding for many years. The percentage of positive bacteremias produced have varied as much as the procedures that were used to produce the bacteremias and the methods used to record the presence of microorganisms following the procedures. We found in 1960 that a bacteremia could be produced by simply brushing the teeth (Table 1). A group of 50 dental students were used in the experiment and 26% showed a positive bacteremia in what were considered clean mouths (C. L. Flanigan and J. F. Smith, unpublished data). O'Kell and Elliot 1 showed in 1935 that bacteremia followed dental surgery. In 1949 Lazansky et al 2 produced a detectable bacteremia by scaling the lower mandibular incisors for ten minutes. Peterson 3 in 1951 recovered bacteria in patients treated routinely with scaling and root planing. Richards 4 recovered Streptococcus viridans from the blood stream of patients