1. Fever in an outpatient setting can be different at different level of hospitals. This could be in terms of cause of the fever and severity. This is so evident that I do not think, we need to elaborate further.

2. As already said we wanted to study this in a common clinical setting. It so happened that many of our participants required admission. We have not said in the paper that we planned to study only outpatients. We said we plan to recruit from an outpatient setting.

3. We have presented the effects of antipyretics in different ways. Assessing after a single dose does not change the results. We did not think it ethically appropriate to wait for a period after giving antipyretic before starting any specific therapy.

4. We are unaware of any standard guideline which states that Nimesulide is contra-indicated in infants.

5. We reanalysed the data in three age range groups for the primary outcome variable -time required to reach normal temperature. While the duration was higher in paracetamol group in all the age groups, it was significant in the age group (>5 years; n = 44) but not significant in <1 year (n = 25) and 1-4 years (n = 28). It should be noted here that the sample size becomes too small in sub-analysis and the power of the study to detect the difference becomes less. One should have enough numbers in each of this age group to really comment on it.

6. They point out limitations in the study which we have ourselves pointed out. This includes, dose, frequency of dosing and frequency of measuring temperature. Regarding the last issue, we do not see how it would bias the result as the frequency was same in both the groups.

7. The study was not designed to address the issue of side effects, especially rare ones. As regards laboratory monitoring, it is not recommended to have a full lab monitoring in a trial of a drug. The safety issues are either handled before a clinical trial or as a part of the post licensing watch.

8. The authors point out that five out of six references were from a single industry sponsored symposium, while it is only four. We had done an electronic search and have referred to only those which we could find.