Eleven cases of legionnaires´ disease, all patients living in the same municipality, were admitted to a district hospital in northern Portugal. Preliminary investigations suggested an association with the events of the annual festivities in that municipality. Legionella pneumophila was not isolated from any of the suspected sources, but evidence from a case control study suggested that an aerosol produced by a decorative fountain in the main square during the night of a rock concert was the likely vehicle of infection. The prevalence of smoking was higher among cases than controls.
This paper reports the study of outbreaks of an acute exanthematous disease among children of three schools in the municipality of Braga (Portugal). Laboratory tests were performed for five cases, showing that the disease was not due to infection by measles or rubella virus, and infection with parvovirus B19 was confirmed. There were 41 cases in children: 12 in the kindergarten, 17 in the secondary school and 12 in the primary school. There was only one case in a staff member, who worked in the kindergarten. Eight cases were identified among household contacts; two of them were brothers, one from the kindergarten and another from the secondary school, where the outbreak occurred after the kindergarten outbreak. The estimated values of the basic reproduction number R0 were very low and it is very likely that asymptomatic infectious cases have occurred. The local health authority produced written documents and met with staff members and parents. Primary healthcare facilities and the obstetric department of the local hospital were also informed. As we are approaching the elimination of measles in Portugal and the rest of Europe, with very high vaccine coverage, it is very likely that a high proportion of infectious non-vesicular exanthemas will be due to B19 infections. This is to be taken into account in the design and conduct of surveillance activities, in the context of measles and rubella elimination programmes.
In the 'Identification of eligible trials' of the Results section, we stated that a total of 1635 asthma patients were identified from six trials. Kerstjens et al. mention that the sum of the number of tiotropium patients and control patients exceeds the quoted total number of asthma patients. We acknowledge that this was ambiguous, and would like to clarify that of the trials that were finally included, three (Fardon et al, Peters et al, and Kerstjens et al. 2011) were originally designed as cross-over trials. So, although the actual number of patients totalled 1635 (as shown in Table 1), it was natural that the sum of number of patients from each group exceeded 1635, as patients from cross-over trials underwent both interventions. Finally as Drs Kerstjens and Moroni-Zentraf indicated, we need to highlight that the baseline FEV 1 (%) value from Bateman's trial refers to the placebo treatment arm. In addition, we would like to correct the baseline FEV 1 (%) for the tiotropium treatment arm as 74.1 6 16.12.
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