When people go to the dentist, they generally expect to leave in better health than when they walked in.
But the water dentists use to rinse teeth sometimes carries infectious bacteria.
The Orange County Health Care Agency in California says that nearly two dozen children who received so-called baby root canals, or pulpotomies, are thought to have developed dangerous bacterial infections. Dentists perform pulpotomies to remove infected pulp inside a baby tooth so the rest of the tooth can be spared.
The infections were caused by Mycobacterium abscessus, which the health department traced back to the water at Children's Dental Clinic of Anaheim.
