Author's response

摘要

We thank Ng et al for their response to our paper.1 They raise the interesting issue of gold standards for the measurement of fever. To our knowledge, there is no such single accepted and universally agreed gold standard. In their review article, they summarise the differences between axillary, rectal, tympanic, and pulmonary artery measures using different types of thermometers, but do not present original data to support their assertion that rectal thermometry represents such a ‘gold standard’.2 We were conscious of this issue when we analysed our data and wrote the paper; for this reason we discussed in our introduction the rationale for why we chose to use both measures of agreement and diagnostic accuracy.