Dental disease identified in 2000 year old mummy

http://www.ladowntownnews.com/articles/2007/04/02/health2/health04.txt

"USC orthodontist James Mah may have the oldest client ever - a 2,000-year-old Egyptian girl. His patient was the mummy of a 4- or 5-year-old Egyptian girl. Wrapped and embalmed two millennia ago in North Africa, she called the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, Calif., her home for the past 75 years.

Until 2005, the actual contents of the sarcophagus remained a mystery to museum curators - the plate where you typically find hieroglyphic inscriptions bearing the name and rank of the deceased was missing.

Opening such a delicate object would more than likely damage what remained of the interred and would also represent a serious ethical violation. So when a group of researchers from Stanford University offered to utilize a medical CT scanner to produce an image of the youngster, museum officials cautiously accepted.

The result, culled from more than 60,000 two-dimensional scans that were fed into software that produces a three-dimensional image, earned the group first-place in Science magazine's 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. However, it wasn't until the group sent the images to Mah that an interesting discovery was made.
Utilizing three-dimensional imaging software used in the School of Dentistry's orthodontic clinic, Mah and Jack Choi of Anatomage - manufacturer of the software - discovered tooth fragments lodged in the throat and the nasal pharynx of the mummy . . . . Using image slices from the region where the tooth was dislodged, Mah was able to record bone density measurements to surmise that the girl most likely suffered from advanced dental disease.These observations have led Mah and Choi to suggest that this infection - for which the Egyptians had no cure - may have spread throughout the body."

See the above page for the rest of this fascinating story, together with a photograph of the CT scan image of the skull.