Pediatric Practice: Infectious Diseases - Clinical Infectious Diseases

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In the words of the author, the goal of. Pediatric Practice: Infectious Diseases is “ to provide the generalist pediatrician, a prac- tical, reliable, and evidence-based  ...
other lesson of these cases, however, is that global health governance must move beyond the C-R-I framework—in which actors and institutions merely respond to outbreaks, public fears, political demands, or economic impacts—to more proactive governance arrangements. That may be the greatest challenge of all. Kenneth W. Abbott Program on Global Health, Arizona State University, Tempe

Pediatric Practice: Infectious Diseases Edited by Samir S. Shah New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 2009. 806 pp $84.95 (hardcover).

In the words of the author, the goal of Pediatric Practice: Infectious Diseases is “to provide the generalist pediatrician, a practical, reliable, and evidence-based resource to diagnose and treat commonly encountered pediatric infections.” The textbook is organized into 4 parts. The first part includes practical aspects such as laboratory methods, vaccine safety, infection control, and epidemiology. The next 2 parts include common signs and symptoms of infections, and infections organized by anatomic sites. The final part includes special situations such as perinatally acquired infections, the care of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)–infected children, and infections in children with atopic dermatitis and in internationally adopted children. There are no chapters on specific organisms and little discussion of the pathogenesis of disease. Overall, there are a large number of authors, many early in their careers, with moderate redundancy and varying levels of detail. In the first part of the book, Chapters 1 and 2 outline bacteriology and virology laboratory methods, respectively. The bacteriology laboratory methods are presented somewhat superficially and would be enhanced by more figures to illustrate different diagnostic methods. Chapter 2,

outlining viral laboratory methods, is more comprehensive, but the specific laboratory methods should be moved to the beginning of the chapter to enhance clarity. Chapter 3 summarizes vaccines, with a special focus on vaccine safety. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss Infection Control in both the office and hospital settings. These sections discuss modes of disease transmission, illness exclusions for school and daycare for children and work for health care workers, and vaccinations needed by health care workers. The hospital chapter focuses more on special considerations facing children’s hospital settings. Chapter 6 summarizes Infectious Diseases Epidemiology, mainly addressing study design and basic epidemiologic statistics, which is useful information for the generalist. The next part, including Chapters 7– 15, focuses on signs and symptoms associated with various infectious diseases. The grouping of symptoms into organ systems would have also been more intuitive to follow and would have eliminated some redundancy. Also, some of the chapters have more non-infectious disease information than is needed, including the extensive listing of causes of ataxia and headache. The third part of the book includes a discussion of specific organ system infections. Algorithms are used extensively in this section. Some are very comprehensive and helpful, whereas others are very difficult to follow. There are a number of important diseases that are missing from this section, including brain abscess, intracranial extension of parameningeal foci, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia, toxic shock syndrome, intra-abdominal infections such as liver abscess and peritonitis, and septic shock. The last section includes infections in special populations. The section on HIV is too extensive, given that children with HIV are generally treated at major medical centers by infectious disease specialists and that the rate of HIV infection is decreasing in the United States. This section is less important to generalists, the target audi-

ence for the book. Chapter 55, highlighting HIV prevention after occupational exposure, needle sticks, and sexual exposure, is informative and should be retained in the current format. The chapter describing congenital immunodeficiency syndromes would be markedly enhanced with figures and diagrams of the immune system and illustrative pictures of children experiencing these syndromes. The fever chapters include some redundancy, because infectious mononucleosis is reviewed in both Chapters 60 and 63. The periodic fever chapters are important, but additional details should be provided about the PFAPA (periodic fevers with aphthous stomatitis, pharyngitis, and adenitis) syndrome. The malaria section has excellent figures and smears and is comprehensive. The health care–acquired infection section would have fit nicely into the earlier infection control chapter, which would have reduced redundancy. In summary, although the book provides important information to the generalist about infection, it is less comprehensive than other textbooks of infectious disease and ignores a number of important infections and their management. In addition, the absence of organism-specific information is problematic. However, the algorithms do provide helpful overviews to the generalist in the emergency department, pediatric clinic, or hospital setting. Kathryn M. Edwards Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

BOOK REVIEWS • CID 2010:50 (1 January) • 131 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/50/1/131/311727/Pediatric-Practice-Infectious-Diseases by guest on 10 October 2017