Edited by Drummond Rennie, MD, Senior Contributing Editor; Sharon Iverson, Assistant Editor.
To the Editor.— The Centers for Disease Control have recently modified the case definition of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) to include the empiric diagnosis of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP).1 In many areas, clinicians are reluctant to make a tissue diagnosis of PCP because doing so may require invasive diagnostic procedures. We believe that PCP should almost always be diagnosed definitively, particularly in patients for whom the diagnosis will establish the presence of AIDS. Diagnosis of PCP does not always require bronchoscopy; Pneumocystis can be identified in specimens of induced sputum using Giemsa or silver methenamine stains.2,3We recently evaluated 450 patients believed to have a high probability of PCP on clinical grounds using sputum induction followed by bronchoalveolar lavage and transbronchial biopsy for patients with negative sputum specimens. Two hundred eighty-two (63%) of 450 patients had PCP diagnosed by sputum induction and did not require bronchoscopy. Seventy-seven patients
Country-Specific Mortality and Growth Failure in Infancy and Yound Children and Association With Material Stature
Use interactive graphics and maps to view and sort country-specific infant and early dhildhood mortality and growth failure data and their association with maternal
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