Link Newsletter - August 2023

A 4-year-old male is brought to the emergency department by his mother for further evaluation of ear pain and headache.  

A patient comes to the emergency department with a faint maculopapular rash. He is experiencing joint pain and edema in his left hand and right knee. Upon arrival, he is febrile with a temperature of 38.3 degrees Celsius. Mom feels frustrated because this is the third time her child has been evaluated by a doctor, and each time they have been told a different diagnosis. She says, “I am just so tired; he was sick earlier this month with an ear infection, and now he is sick again!” What’s on your differential?

Pediatric clinicians are committed to providing recommended vaccines to their patients. But vaccine hesitancy continues to be an obstacle to providing some or all recommended vaccines.  

Newborn screening (NBS) began in the 1960s with testing for phenylketonuria (PKU), which, when identified and treated early, significantly reduces morbidity. While NBS is rightly viewed as a public health success resulting in overall positive impacts on the health and wellbeing of newborns, its benefits and burdens are not always distributed equitably.  

Cephalosporins are considered first-line antibiotics for treating pediatric urinary tract infections (UTIs). However, not all cephalosporins are created equal, and strategic marketing of non-inferiority trials and observational studies has resulted in use without consideration of their pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic limitations.

Many readers will have seen the report of locally acquired malaria in Florida and Texas earlier this year. So, far, a total of eight cases have been identified, seven in Florida (all in Sarasota County) and one, likely unrelated, in Texas (Cameron County). Prior to this year, the last documentation of malaria acquired in the United States was in 2003, also in Florida, where eight cases of Plasmodium vivax infection were identified.