Hostage to History: The Duration of Antimicrobial Treatment for Acute Streptococcal Pharyngitis.

Oral antimicrobial treatment of acute streptococcal pharyngitis commonly is given for 10 days. An investigation was conducted of journal publications and textbooks from the dawn of the antimicrobial era to the present in order to discover the basis for this settled practice. Current treatment duration for acute streptococcal pharyngitis was established half a century ago under conditions significantly different from those currently encountered by the average clinician.

Fulminant bacterial meningitis.

Background: Fulminant bacterial meningitis is a rare host reaction to infection characterized by sudden onset, rapid deterioration, abrupt cerebral edema and refractory intracranial hypertension associated with an extremely high mortality rate.

Methods: A search of all relevant medical literature since 1900 was conducted to clarify the nature of this entity and its medical management.

Results: Fulminant meningitis occurs in a small percentage of all cases of bacterial meningitis, at all ages and with all infecting organisms.

San Francisco pedestrian injury surveillance: mapping, under-reporting, and injury severity in police and hospital records.

Goals: Police reports of severely injured pedestrians help identify hazardous traffic areas in San Francisco, but they under-report non-fatal collisions. We set out to: identify injured pedestrians who were missing from police collision reports, see what biases exist in injury reporting and assess the utility of broad categories of police severe injury (including fatal) for mapping and analysis.

Methods: We linked data on injured pedestrians from police collision reports listed in the Statewide Integrated Traffic Reporting System (SWITRS, n = 1991) with records of pedestrians treated at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH, n = 1323) for 2000 and 2001.