Response to 'comparison of rectal, axillary, tympanic, and temporal artery thermometry in the pediatric emergency room'

摘要

The American College of Emergency Physicians provides clear practice guidelines on management of febrile children in the emergency department, and in such a setting fever is described as elevated temperature as measured rectally.No alternative method of temperature measurement for detection of fever in children in the emergency department setting is supported by practice guideline or policy of any major American professional organization of emergency medicine, pediatric emergency medicine, or pediatric physicians.The authors introduce their study by describing theoretical risk of HIV transmission via rectal thermometry. Disappointingly, their described methods do not specify whether a sterile rectal thermometer is used on each patient, or if they simply reuse contaminated rectal thermometers from patient to patient. It is quite telling that these authors choose to specify HIV as a potential transmissible infection, because there are dozens of more likely infections, some fatal, that would be expected from sharing rectal thermometers between patients.