Comparison of sepsis definitions in a resource poor environment.

Sepsis is an important cause of childhood death in developing countries. The International Pediatric Sepsis Consensus Conference (IPSCC) guidelines for definition has five categories and requires complex information, which may be difficult to access in resource poor settings, possibly leading to under-diagnosis and problems with triage, referral and documentation for public health assessments. We aimed to provide a workable system for grading sepsis categories, assess this against the IPSCC definition and use this information to guide further adaptations.