You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
PostScript
Correspondence
Prescribing amoxicillin for babies up to 3 months of age: definitely time for change
  1. Michael Malley1,
  2. Akanksha Garg2,
  3. Marie Monaghan3,
  4. Beate Kampmann2
  1. 1Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, St Mary's Hospital, London, UK
  2. 2Imperial College London, London, UK
  3. 3King's College London NHS Trust, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Michael Malley, Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, St Mary's Hospital, Praed Street, London W2 1NY, UK; m.malley{at}nhs.net

https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2015-310219

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines recommend that amoxicillin is prescribed for suspected sepsis in infants under 3 months old in order to provide cover for Listeria monocytogenes infection.1 Following the article of Okike et al2, we present further evidence supporting the suggestion that prescription of routine amoxicillin should be limited solely to infants aged under 30 days.

    Infection with Listeria monocytogenes is rare, particularly outside the neonatal period. Over the past decade, only 120 cases of Listeria have been isolated in infants throughout England and Wales, with 97.5% (N=117) occurring in the first month of life.3 The three remaining babies were aged 3, 6 and 11 months. …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors This article was written by the four named authors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.