Ventilator Associated Pneumonia in Children: Current Status and Future Prospects

Excerpt

Invasive mechanical ventilation (MV) is a lifesaving support system for critically sick children in emergency and Intensive care units. As per the national estimates, there were 790,257 hospitalizations with MV across all ages (except newborns) in the United States in 2005. This accounted for 2.7 episodes of mechanical ventilation per 1000 population and an estimated cost of $27.0 billion [1]. Though MV is now used even at district level hospitals, no such estimates are available for most of the developing countries, which makes it difficult to assess the true burden of VAP. Though the reported incidence across the globe varies from 2 to 17%, a higher incidence of 38.4% is reported from the developing countries [2]. …