id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-354918-129inbwq	Kotsimbos, T.	Respiratory infectious disease: complacency with empiricism in the age of molecular science. We can do better!	2007-06-04		.txt	text/plain	2102	100	32	A few home truths (i) Viral infections are an important cause of respiratory infection and yet a specific diagnosis is rarely made, (ii) few antiviral therapies exist and when they do -such as in the case of influenza -they are either underused or overused because of diagnostic inefficiencies, (iii) our approach to using antibacterial agents is guided by 'what should reasonably be covered' or 'what organisms are being missed' rather than a treatment regimen targeted for a particular organism, (iv) in association with diagnostic uncertainty, we do not make sufficient allowances for immunocompromised states or overexuberant immune responses to respiratory infectious disease (RID) and (v) current antibiotic guidelines encourage an approach of increasingly covering all potential organisms depending on the severity of illness. Our current reliance on empirical antibiotic strategies to cover 'likely bacterial pathogens' as set out in numerous guidelines is unavoidable in the short term given the current diagnostic limitations for respiratory infection syndromes.	./cache/cord-354918-129inbwq.txt	./txt/cord-354918-129inbwq.txt