A viewer asks: “The connection between oral hygiene and cardiovascular disease, particularly heart disease, is becoming more established in scientific literature. It appears that gum disease (periodontitis) and root infections, can lead to bacteria entering the bloodstream and travelling to vital organs, including the heart and breasts, promoting the formation of arterial plaques. Although Get Wisdom has probed Creator many times about products to treat gum disease I want to quantify the seriousness of the problem. In what percentage of cases are oral infections responsible for heart attacks and breast cancers and other chronic degenerative diseases?”

This idea has been promoted several times now over the course of years; first, with speculation and then with more accompanying evidence of connecting links to substantiate the basic hypothesis. But we can tell you that the bacterial cause of such illnesses is a very small percentage of cases. The true culprit in most chronic illnesses is viral and, indeed, your channel has established through us that viral gum disease can spread viruses throughout the body to any organ and this does happen routinely. Whether those particular viruses can take root and persist and grow to be a large enough source of harm to cause symptoms of illness will be highly variable. But it is commonplace to have, ultimately, multiple smoldering viral infections producing chronic diseases running concurrently.