Signs of severe illness in young infants.

In the study from Delhi, all the 1626 triaged patients are not accounted for. If one adds the excluded patients (n=487) to the ones enrolled (n=878), it totals to 1365. It is not clear what happened to the remaining 261 patients. Despite the fact that the 2 studies followed an identical protocol, the Chandigarh site excluded a large number of subjects under headings that do not even figure in the Delhi study: quota filled for the day (n=355), scheduled visit (n=383) and revisit (n=183). If it were true that the Delhi study did not exclude these categories, it would mean that their study population had a larger proportion of patients who had no obvious on-going sickness (scheduled visit, revisit). The non-exclusion of such patients could result in spuriously better odds ratios and predictive values in Delhi compared to Chandigarh.