© 2003 BMJ Publishing Group & Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
LEADING ARTICLE
Surgery
Empyema thoracis: not time to put down the knife
"A minor operation: one performed on somebody else" (Anon)
Keywords: VATS; decortication; empyema; fibrinolysis
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The incidence of empyema has increased dramatically in children over the past decade. A sevenfold increase in cases was first recorded in the UK in 1997,1 and a similar increase has recently been reported in the USA.2 Routine bacterial culture is usually negative in the UK as the great majority of patients have received antibiotics prior to referral, and this has impeded research into the cause of the phenomenon. Fortunately, new techniques have recently confirmed that the majority of our cases are due to pneumococcal infection,3 and fascinatingly that most of these cases are due to infection with organisms of serotype 1.4 This serotype is also now dominant in culture positive cases in the USA,2 and is associated with an increase of invasive pneumococcal disease in Scandinavia.5 In recent years serotype 14 has been the dominant cause of invasive disease in the UK,6 and until now infection with serotype
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Arch. Dis. Child. 2003 88: 839.[Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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- Empyema Thoracis
- Dakshesh Parikh
- ADC Online, 17 Nov 2003 [Full text]
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