• Pneumonia

We believe the authors of the 2009 update of the guidelines for the management of community-acquired pneumonia1 have confused mortality predictors with severity-of-illness scores. They state ‘we have concentrated only on studies that have used mortality as the main outcome measure’. We recognise that there are difficulties in using intensive care admission as an outcome measure because of variation in admission criteria. However, 30-day survival of patients with low mortality predictor scores does not mean they were not severely ill, merely that …