Response to two days of oral amoxycillin in children with non-severe pneumonia

Abstract

Pneumonia is a common cause of childhood morbidity(1). For the standard case management of non-severe pneumonia, co-trimoxazole has been recommended as the antibiotic of choice (2-5) and is being used in India. However, there are reports from India as well as other countries about rising resistance of two most common bacteria, Streptcoccus pneumoniae and Haemo-philus influenzae, against co-trimoxazole(6-10). This has made it necessary to find alternative antibodies for the community-based treatment of non-severe pneumonia. The preferred alter-native is amoxycillin(9,11,12). The use of amoxycillin instead of co-trimoxazole would substantially increase the cost of treatment of non-severe pneumonia. Since workers have reported that shorter duration of treatment of non-severe pneumonia does result in clinical cure(13) and since there is meager data on the clinical efficacy of amoxycillin for the treatment of non-severe pneumonia, the current study was conducted to assess the clinical response to amoxycillin after 2 days of a five day course of antibiotic therapy.