FEVER IS one of the most common presenting complaints among children who are ill. Parents have become accustomed to, even fixated on, determining the presence or absence of fever and the degree of temperature elevation in their ill children; yet, many still do not obtain accurate temperatures at home. The reasons for this are multiple: inaccessibility to a thermometer, inability to read the thermometer, or hesitancy to obtain the temperature properly. As long as parents are reluctant to obtain rectal temperatures, industry will continue to devise and market alternative technologies for temperature measurement.
I read the article on the pacifier thermometer by Press and Quinn1 in this issue of the Archives with great interest. The authors used a simple study design to investigate the correlation between temperatures obtained with the new electronic pacifier thermometer and a digital electronic rectal thermometer. Their article provides important initial statistical data on the