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Correspondence

Indian Pediatr 2016;53: 536

Nasopharyngeal Carriage of Organisms in Children With Severe Pneumonia: Authors’ reply

 

*Meenu Singh and Amit Agarwal

Department Of Pediatrics, Advanced Pediatrics Centre, PGIMER, Chandigarh, India.
Email: [email protected] 

  


1. The current paper was a part of a multicentric randomized controlled trial for oral amoxicillin administered at hospital vs. home [1], published elsewhere. The children with effusion or consolidation were excluded as they required special care and hospitalization for longer durations, and were therefore excluded.

2. The word ‘consolidation’ has been used to refer end point consolidation which means a significant pathology that means a dense or fluffy opacity that occupies a whole of the lobe or entire lung that may or may not contain air- bronchograms. The term ‘infiltrate’ was used to define non endpoint infiltrations which include minor patchy infiltrates that are of no sufficient magnitude to constitute primary endpoint consolidation [2,3].

3. The categorization of patients was based on the place of administration of oral amoxicillin i.e. whether it has been administered in a hospital setting or at home.

4. Serotyping would have helped definitely but it was beyond the scope of this study as it was focused on treatment of community-acquired pneumonia with oral amoxicillin, and was not directed towards the etiology of the disease [1].

5. The patients were enrolled between 2009 to 2011. Hib vaccination was not a part of national immunization at that time.

6. The pneumococcus isolates and their antibiotic susceptibility has been shown in the manuscript [4].

References

1. Patel AB, Bang A, Singh M, Dhande L, Chelliah LR, Malik A, et al. A randomized controlled trial of hospital versus home based therapy with oral amoxicillin for severe pneumonia in children aged 3 – 59 months: The IndiaCLEN Severe Pneumonia Oral Therapy (ISPOT) Study.  BMC Pediatrics. 2015;15:186.

2. Simbalista R, Araújo M, Nascimento Carvalho CM. Outcome of children hospitalized with community acquired pneumonia treated with aqueous penicillin G. Clinics (Sao Paulo). 2011;66:95-100.

3. Cherian T, Mulholland EK, Carlin JB, Ostensen H, Amin R, de Campo M, et al. Standardized interpretation of paediatric chest radiographs for the diagnosis of pneumonia in epidemiological studies. Bull WHO. 2005;83:353-9.

4. Singh M, Agarwal A, Das RR, Jaiswal N, Ray P. Nasopharyngeal carriage of organisms in children aged 3 to 59 months diagnosed with severe community acquired pneumonia. Indian Pediatr. 2016;53:125-8.   

 

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