End of the Road for Dental Amalgam?

Readers will be aware of the Minamata Agreement, signed in 2013, in which 147 countries around the world agreed to minimize mercury use in a wide variety of fields, such as, lighting, fertilizers, and, of course, dental amalgam. This resulted in a ban, from 1 July 2018, on the use of amalgam in pregnant women and children under the age of 15 years. Some dental schools had, by then, on the surface, stopped teaching the concepts of resistance and retention form, and, as a result, a proportion of new graduates had no notion of how to retain an amalgam restoration in a tooth!1 This lack of preparedness is a particular concern in the UK as amalgam is still in widespread use among dental practitioners2.