This just in from the extremely important breaking news department:

Tooth Study Won’t Prompt Smiles in Appalachia

ATLANTA (Reuters) – There was nothing for the older folk of Appalachia to smile about on Thursday in the government’s latest study of toothlessness among the elderly, which found the poverty-stricken region leading the nation in tooth loss.

Kentucky and West Virginia have the highest percentage of older adults missing all their natural teeth according to data collected in 2002 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news – web sites).

Slightly more than 42 percent of residents 65 and older in Kentucky could make that dubious claim last year. West Virginians were a close second with 41.9 percent of seniors admitting they had shed their natural choppers.

In both states, older adults who were naturally toothless outnumbered those who could say they had lost five or fewer of their natural teeth.

At least if they come back from the dead as vampires, they should be relatively harmless.

Read the rest here.

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