Interesting analysis. I learned a bunch of things.
One comment: the 1/10 rate is the mortality of treated patients. The mortality rate of untreated bacterial meningitis is much closer to 100%.[1]
This means the number-needed-to-treat for antibiotics goes from above 10 to between 1 and 2.
How would an order of magnitude difference here change your analysis?
Reliable recent numbers are hard to come by, probably because ~all conclusively diagnosed patients in western countries are treated or diagnosed posthumously. There is an NEJM paper citing numbers (from the pre-antibiotic era) between 70% and 100% for the different pathogens. ↩︎
Interesting analysis. I learned a bunch of things.
One comment: the 1/10 rate is the mortality of treated patients. The mortality rate of untreated bacterial meningitis is much closer to 100%.[1] This means the number-needed-to-treat for antibiotics goes from above 10 to between 1 and 2. How would an order of magnitude difference here change your analysis?
Reliable recent numbers are hard to come by, probably because ~all conclusively diagnosed patients in western countries are treated or diagnosed posthumously. There is an NEJM paper citing numbers (from the pre-antibiotic era) between 70% and 100% for the different pathogens. ↩︎