Preschool Mouths: Dental Disaster Zones - ABC News: During an interview, he said he’d just received a phone call from an [fluoridated] NYU pediatric dental resident who had examined a 4-year-old with several cavities, including one that had caused major facial swelling. “The infection had gone through the tooth, down into the surrounding bone of the jaw and spread up into the face under the eye,” Moursi said.

The child was going to be treated with powerful antibiotics, but might still require a trip to the operating room to extract the tooth, he said. In rare cases, such dental infections can spread to the brain, or into the heart and lungs, he said.

“When you have a 6-month wait to get into the O.R. and they’re all 3-year-olds, we know we have a problem,” Moursi said.