Nickie Muir: Dental nurses can lick lollipop curse

The dentist was often known around schools as the "torture house", says Nickie Muir.

In every school around New Zealand there was a building the kids referred to as the "torture house".

I miss the scary mistress of things dental with her toothy smile and antiseptic smell. I'm old enough to remember when dental nurses dressed like nuns and exuded a similar moral virtue.

Dental cleanliness if not next to godliness was definitely evidence of goodliness. I would vote for almost any political party that would bring back healthy unhappiness in the form of dental nurses to all those abandoned little whares around Northland schools.

To the same extent that I love dental nurses, I loathe the inventor of those blue lollipops that every kid in low decile schools seems to have permanently attached to their faces. What in God's name in nature is that colour? Not blueberries. Not even deadly nightshade. Definitely not anything that is not toxic.

I swear that kids' teeth in the poorest areas in New Zealand are permanently blue and that the manufacturer or the supplier of said blue lollipops better be saving hard to pay for the lawsuits coming their way when people wake up and discover that blue lollipops are the new tobacco.

Lollipops are undermining teachers, mothers and dentists in a daily onslaught of dental destruction - even GPs have been corrupted by their sneaky charms.

There is no end to the joy a child can find when nice GP offers a lollipop to a compliant small person when food fascist mums have banned them.

These tooth terrorists will stain stainless steel. I'm not even joking. I didn't query if it was "tika" or even legal to tell a class that John Key had passed a law that meant that anyone found with a blue lollipop on an educational facility would automatically fail NCEA and that there were "aerial blood tests" that could be done to detect contact with said toxic tooth rot. I figured it was a matter of national security.

I'm not one of these food freaks that insists their child eats only organic carrots or kale in the style of the conscious uncoupling of theory from any evidence that people like Gwyneth Paltrow indulges in.

Kids need the odd random lolly of happy colours and nutritionless pointlessness. These bright blue lollipops and acid/sugar sweets, the corrosive blue acid of fizzy that without the "sour" would be so cloyingly sweet as to make it undrinkable are made more vile, however, being cheaper than milk and so often consumed.

According to a DHB report from five years ago: "Northland experiences some of the highest dental disease rates in New Zealand. There are inequalities of both oral health status and access to oral health services, particularly for Maori and Pacific people and those living in rural areas and with lower socioeconomic status. None of Northland's water supplies are fluoridated".

It should have added "many are fighting an uncivil war against a tsunami of blue lollipops and legions of dental nurses must be recruited to wage a holy war of dental happiness".