Sir, unfortunately the article by Dr Carrotte on endodontic treatment for children (BDJ 2005, 198: 9) is woefully out of date. It is clear that the author is not a paediatric dentist and I wonder if a paediatric dentist would ever be allowed to publish an article on a subject unrelated to his/her area of expertise? The author does not appear to have kept up on the literature concerning pulp therapy in children particularly with research published within the past five years which has been considerable in its extent.

The use of formocresol is now out of date. This medicament has been almost totally superceded by ferric sulphate, because of the concerns in the last ten years over the toxicity of formocresol. More recently, formaldehyde has been linked with certain forms of cancer, in particular nasopharyngeal carcinoma in a systematic review, following which most paediatric dentists in the UK have abandoned its use. Ferric sulphate has been shown to be equally as effective as formocresol but without any potential toxicity. There have been a considerable number of papers on this change culminating in a symposium held in Dublin in 2002, the proceedings of which were then published1,2,3,4 and since then a systematic review has been published on its efficacy. It is widely accepted now within the profession that ferric sulphate is the mainstay for pulpotomies in primary molars. It is therefore unacceptable that it is not even mentioned in a review article on this subject published in year 2005 in a leading British Journal.

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