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CALGARY — One child’s teeth were in such poor condition she found it too painful to eat. The child, born after Calgary removed fluoride from the city’s drinking water in 2011, was starting to look thin and malnourished, recalls Denise Kokaram, program lead of the Alex Dental Health Bus.

“At that point, the problem was escalating. The estimate for care was beyond (the parents’) scope. They couldn’t afford to fix it and the child started to lose weight,” she said.

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“She needed to go into an operating room and there were barriers with language. Now the parents had concerns about putting the child under general anesthetic because … the disease was so severe.”

These are the kinds of cases that Kokaram is seeing more and more frequently with the Alex, which has outfitted a mobile dental office in a bus. It travels to kids in high-risk schools offering dental checkups and referrals.

A recent study that compared the incidence of cavities in Calgary with Edmonton (which maintains water fluoridation) found that Calgary children’s teeth got relatively worse compared with those of their less wealthy, less educated counterparts in Edmonton. While the study said nothing positive about council’s decision to stop water fluoridation, neither was it perfectly damning.