BACKGROUND People seek Chinese medicine (CM) treatments for a variety of respiratory disorders, e.g., asthma and upper respiratory tract infection (URTI). No previous studies have reviewed the data available in medical records from Australian clinics. This study aims to identify the characteristics of patients with respiratory disorders who visited a CM teaching clinic at RMIT University in Mel...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the association between contacts with other children and the development of respiratory infections in the first year of life in children with or without genetic predisposition for allergy. METHODS Children (n = 4146) who participate in a prospective birth cohort study (Prevention and Incidence of Asthma and Mite Allergy study) were investigated. Questionnaires were us...

BACKGROUND There is little information that describe the burden of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) associated disease in the tropical African outpatient setting. METHODS We studied a systematic sample of children aged <5 years presenting to a rural district hospital in Kenya with acute respiratory infection (ARI) between May 2002 and April 2004. We collected clinical data and screened nasal...

UNLABELLED Cefixime is an oral third generation cephalosporin, frequently used in respiratory tract infections (RTI) in the pediatric population. However, in some publications cefixime has demonstrated poor efficacy against staphylococci and streptococci. THE AIM of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of cefixime in the treatment of community-acquired infections in a country where parente...

Upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) is an acute infection which involves the upper respiratory tract: nose, sinuses, tonsils and pharynx. URT infections are caused mainly by pathogenic bacteria like Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae and Staphylococcus aureus. Conventionally, β-lactam antibiotics are used to treat URT infections. Penicillin binding proteins (PBPs) catalyze th...

■■■■ The impact of a 12-week training program by elite swimmers on systemic and mucosal immunity was studied prospectively to examine the relationship between changes in immune parameters and the incidence of respiratory illness. Saliva was collected before and after selected training sessions at 2 weekly intervals. There were significant decreases in salivary IgA (p = 0.05) and salivary IgM (p...

OBJECTIVE This study evaluated the frequencies of allergic symptoms and rate of upper respiratory infections during the past year in the general population, kitchen workers (KW) and health care workers (HCW). METHODS The European Community Respiratory Health Survey (ECRHS) was used to inquire retrospectively about asthma and asthma-like symptoms and the number of treatments required for previ...

In a previous issue of the European Respiratory Journal STEVENS et al. [1] suggested that preschool children with wheeze account for a significant proportion of the UK healthcare budget. Most preschool wheezing is caused by viral infection and, therefore, we wondered how much preschool children with upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) without wheeze would cost the National Health Service? ...