2013 May 27

Review declared as stable

We do not think any new trials will appear in the literature that fulfills the inclusion criteria for this review. Current guidelines for choice of antibiotics universally recommend third generation cephalosporin (+ vancomycin) as an empiric therapy in community‐acquired bacterial meningitis and has become ‘standard of care’. This is based on the emergence of antibiotic resistance of common aetiologic organisms. Thus, any trial with one arm receiving older (conventional) antibiotics, such as penicillin or chloramphenicol will probably be considered unethical. Hence, we do not think any new trial of these interventions will appear in the literature.

We also conducted a search on ‘PubMed’ from March 2006 to May 2013 using keywords  ‘meningitis’ AND ‘cephalosporin’ OR ‘ceftraxone’ OR ‘cefotaxime’ OR ‘ceftazidime’ OR ‘cefmenoxime’ OR ‘cefodizime’ OR ‘ceftizoxime’ OR ‘moxalactam’ OR ‘third generation cephalosporin’ AND ‘conventional antibiotics’ or ‘ampicillin’ OR ‘penicillin’ OR ‘ampicillin‐chloramphenicol’ without any language or publication restrictions. We retrieved 627 hits. After reading the titles we excluded 600 trials and after reading the abstracts we excluded 27 trials. We did not find any new study that fulfilled our inclusion criteria.

2011 Apr 07

New search has been performed

Searches conducted. No new trials were identified for inclusion. One trial was excluded in this update (Wazib 2008). Our conclusions remain unchanged

2008 Jun 28

Amended

Converted to new review format.

2017 May 10

Amended

Converted to new review format.