The National Coordinating Centre for Health Technology Assessment recently issued a commissioning brief calling for proposals to look at “the clinical effectiveness of paracetamol alone, ibuprofen alone, and paracetamol and ibuprofen in combination in the management of fever in pre-school children”.¹ This call raises a number of issues regarding the use of such drug combinations in the treatment of febrile children.

Fever phobia is a term that was coined some years ago to describe exaggerated fears …