[afro-nets] Knowledge and skills to recognise fever

["Claudio Schuftan" <cschuftan@phmovement.org>]

crossposted from : "[health-vn discussion group]" <health-vn@cairo.anu.edu.au>
>From : CHILD2015 CHILD2015@dgroups.org

A review in this month's issue of Journal of Tropical Pediatrics looks at
the accuracy of a mother's touch in identifying fever in her child. This is important because (1) few mothers have a thermometer (or Thermospot); and (2) failure to recognise fever may lead to delay in treatment for malaria and other life-threatening illnesses.

Here is the abstract: 'Universally, mothers often use touching to detect fever in their children. We perform a systematic review of published diagnostic studies evaluating the ability of mothers to detect fever in their children by touching. We found 10 studies satisfying our inclusion criteria. The meta-analysis revealed a summary sensitivity of 89.2% and summary specificity of 50% - maternal touch is perhaps more useful to exclude fever rather than to 'rule in' fever. However, due to significant heterogeneity in the included studies, interpretation of the summary data is difficult.'

Ref: The Accuracy of Mother's Touch to Detect Fever in Children: A Systematic Review. Teng CL et al. Journal of Tropical Pediatrics 2008 54(1):70-73
http://tropej.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/54/1/70 (the full text is restricted-access)

--
Vern Weitzel 
mailto:vern@coombs.anu.edu.au