Loading...
One of the major issues in acute care pediatrics is management of febrile infants, especially those aged >3 months. Although most such episodes are not caused by serious bacterial infection (SBI), the rapidity with which life-threatening infections can develop in infants who appear only mildly ill often results in unnecessary hospitalization and use of broad-spectrum intravenous antibiotics.
Investigators have attempted to develop clinical criteria that — used in combination with laboratory screening tests — can define a group of infants who are unlikely to have SBI and thus do not require hospitalization or empirical antibiotics, but no criteria or clinical prediction rules have been sufficiently definitive to rule out SBI. False-positive r…