Do pediatric emergency departments pose a risk of infection?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: There is no data documenting the existence of a risk of infection transmission in ambulatory healthcare settings but concern remains. Our objective was to determine the risk of infection associated to a pediatric Emergency Department (ED) visit and the predictors of infection in children aged 5 years and less. METHODS: Children aged 5 years and less with an ED visit between February and April of a non pandemic season were recruited and followed-up by telephone interviews to ascertain the development of new respiratory and gastrointestinal infections. Approximately half of the parents were called 7-10 days after their child's ED visit. The other half were called at least 14 days after the visit and served as the ED-unexposed group. The principal outcome was the onset of a new infection in the week preceding the phone interview, using standardized definitions. Proportions of children with new infections were calculated in both groups and logistic regression was used to adjust for potential confounders. RESULTS: A total of 304 children (mean age 2.4 years) were followed. Of the 137 children with a recent ED visit, 21 (15.3%) developed an infection compared to 39 of 167 (23.4%) of those without a recent visit. The relative risk (RR) associated with ED exposure was 0.7 (95%CI 0.4-1.1). As 85 children with a recent ED visit presented to the ED with a viral infection, we repeated the analysis excluding them to improve our capacity to detect new infections: 9 children (17.3%) developed an infection (RR = 0.7 [95%CI 0.4-1.4]). The only factor associated with an increased risk of infection was an intra-familial infectious contact (RR 9.9; 95%CI 1.7-58.9). CONCLUSION: A visit to a pediatric ED does not result in a detectable increased risk of infection above the risk in the community. This is likely explained by the high baseline risk of infections in young children. However, we cannot eliminate the possibility that a risk of infection may still exist and would warrant a larger study to document.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".