Pneumonia causes almost 1 in 5 under-five deaths worldwide: more than 2 million children each year. It kills more children than any other disease - more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. Yet lack of attention to the disease means too few children have access to currently available interventions. Preventing children under five from developng pneumonia in the first place is key. This joint UNICEF/WHO publication is designed to raise awareness and reduce child mortality from pneumonia, which will contribute to achieving the Millennium Development Goal on child mortality.

Treatment of community-acquired pneumonia and hospital-acquired pneumonia, when to hospitalize a patient, methods of identifying low-risk CAP patients, switch and step-down therapy, approach to nonresloving pneumonia, management of parapneumonic effusions, empyema, and chronic bronchitis are discussed. The various antimicrobial agents are reviewed in deatil with suggested treatment regimens.

Pneumonia (along with influenza) is the sixth leading cause of death in adults. About 4 million adults develop pneumonia each year in the US, resulting in 64 million days of restricted activity, 39 million days of bed confinement, and 10 million days of lost work. Yet the admission rates to hospital, length of stay, investigations, antimicrobial therapy and prevention strategies vary greatly from one geographic area to the next, and the scientific basis for many of our management strategies for pneumonia is weak to nonexistent. There are over 100 microbial agents that can cause pneumonia and many of these, especially Streptococcus pneumoniae, Group A streptococcus, and Staphylococcus aureus, are in a state of flux in terms of changing antimicrobial resistance. This book is designed to provide new information about pneumonia and identify critical research questions that will come to the fore as we enter the 21st century.

Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) continues to be one of the greatest challenges to critical care practitioners and one of the greatest threats to the survival of our patients. The choice of this topic for an issue of the PERSPECTIVES IN CRITICAL CARE INFECTIOUS DISEASES Series is therefore quite appropriate. Despite its importance, many areas of the management of ventilator-associated pneumonia remain controversial. We therefore are pleased to include contributions from experts and investigators offering different perspectives on some of these controversial areas.

This multi-contributed text, co-ordinated by one of the leading authorities in the field, is a unique resource to cover in depth the management of the important issue of Nosocomial Pneumonia in respiratory medicine and critical care. This disease presents the clinician with a variety of challenges, in both diagnosis and management, all of which represent a significant concern for the welfare of patients whose ability to combat infection is frequently already compromised. Nosocomial Pneumonia: Strategies for Management is dedicated specifically to this most common hospital acquired respiratory infection and reviews important new advances in therapeutics, including drug resistance. It is an essential resource for all postgraduates and specialist physicians in pulmonology and infectious diseases.

Severe Community Acquired Pneumonia is a book in which chapters are authored and the same topics discussed by North American and European experts. This approach provides a unique opportunity to view the different perspectives and points of view on this subject. Severe CAP is a common clinical problem encountered in the ICU setting. This book reviews topics concerning the pathogenesis, diagnosis and management of SCAP. The discussions on the role of alcohol in severe CAP and adjunctive therapies are important topics that further our understanding of this severe respiratory infection.

Community-Acquired Pneumonia (CAP) refers to pneumonia acquired outside of hospitals or extended-care facilities, and is distinct from Nosocomial or hospital-acquired pneumonia, which is a separate disease entity. It is one of the most common respiratory infections and presents one of the major health problems today, with an incidence that ranges from eight to fifty cases per thousand individuals each year. Mortality is still very high and yet the risk factors are very well known. Many of these are related to antibiotic treatment; delay in administration, inadequacy of empiric antibiotics and lack of adherence to guidelines for treatment are all clearly associated with poor treatment outcomes. Following a description of the epidemiology and microbial etiology of ambulatory and hospitalized CAP, this book provides an in-depth review of the important new advances in therapeutics, including management of drug resistance to the three major classes of antibiotics used for treatment of CAP: β-lactams, macrolides and quinolones. All of them have advantages and disadvantages and these are put into perspective. This book highlights guideline recommendations and presents a balanced analysis to help physicians deliver the highest standard of care. In addition, the authors provide an insight into the 10% of patients who do not respond to antibiotics and could benefit from adjunctive therapies, some still under review. This volume will be welcomed by pulmonologists and all clinicians involved in managing community-acquired pneumonia.

Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a disease associated with high morbidity and mortality. The goal of this volume is to present state-of-the-art knowledge on epidemiology, clinical presentation, immunology, pathology, and diagnosis of CAP including the identification of "new pathogens". Therapeutic approaches, antibiotics resistance, disease management and vaccination strategies are also covered.

Pneumonia—Osler's "Captain of the Men of Death" and still the leading infectious cause of death in the United States—has until now received scant attention from historians. In Pneumonia Before Antibiotics, clinician-historian Scott H. Podolsky uses pneumonia's enduring prevalence and its centrality to the medical profession's therapeutic self-identity to examine the evolution of therapeutics in twentieth-century America. Focusing largely on the treatment of pneumonia in first half of the century with type-specific serotherapy, Podolsky provides insight into the rise and clinical evaluation of therapeutic "specifics," the contested domains of private practice and public health, and-as the treatment of pneumonia made the transition from serotherapy to chemotherapy and antibiotics—the tempo and mode of therapeutic change itself. Type-specific serotherapy, founded on the tenets of applied immunology, justified by controlled clinical trials, and grounded in a novel public ethos, was deemed revolutionary when it emerged to replace supportive therapeutics. With the advent of the even more revolutionary sulfa drugs and antibiotics, pneumonia ceased to be a public health concern and became instead an illness treated in individual patients by individual physicians. Podolsky describes the new therapeutics and the scientists and practitioners who developed and debated them. He finds that, rather than representing a barren era in anticipation of some unknown transformation to come, the first decades of the twentieth-century shaped the use of, and reliance upon, the therapeutic specific throughout the century and beyond. This intriguing study will interest historians of medicine and science, policymakers, and clinicians alike.