1 Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University Medical Center, Stanford, CA 94305
In Reply.
I appreciate Feldman's comments about our study. Although physicians' assessment has proved useful in predicting which children have serious bacterial infections such as meningitis, this appears not to be applicable to children with occult bacteremia. In most of the studies cited by Feldman, the number of children with bacteremia was too small to determine the physicians' ability to predict which children were bacteremic.1 In the study by Waskerwitz and Berkelhamer,2 physicians were able to predict bacteremia in only eight of 17 cases, and five of these eight patients had meningitis.