Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Duke, Trevor

Titel

What the PERCH study means for future pneumonia strategies

Ist Teil von

• The Lancet (British edition), 2019-08, Vol.394 (10200), p.714-716

Ort / Verlag

England: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In The Lancet, the Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health (PERCH) Study Group report the findings of the PERCH study,4 an impressive attempt at understanding the diverse causes of acute lower respiratory infections in the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) era. The group enrolled 4232 children aged 1–59 months admitted to hospital with what WHO previously classified as severe or very severe pneumonia, with the primary analysis population comprised of 1769 children without HIV infection and with a positive chest x-ray in seven countries over 2 years. PERCH found that ten pathogens accounted for almost 80% of WHO-defined pneumonia in the cases studied. The top ten list of pathogens varied between sites, but the universal causes included respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), Streptococcus pneumoniae, parainfluenza virus, Haemophilus influenzae, human metapneumovirus, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. PERCH enlarges our understanding of the causes of acute lower respiratory infections but might be criticised for not identifying enough pneumococcal infections. The prevalence of S pneumoniae was estimated to be 4·6% (95% CI 3·2–6·2) for severe and 9·7% (6·9–13·1) for very severe pneumonia in the seven countries of the study, and the prevalence (for both severe and very severe pneumonia) varied widely between countries: 15·1% in The Gambia and 17·4% in Mali, and as low as 0·3% in Thailand.