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Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2000;154:963-964.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

The article by Lee and Harper¹ provided useful data on using fever and white blood cell (WBC) count to assess the risk of bacteremia in well-appearing 3- to 36-month-old febrile children. The data were presented as rates of bacteremia at different WBC intervals and as sensitivities, specificities, and positive predictive values for different WBC cutoffs. However, their data would be even more clinically useful if presented as likelihood ratios (LRs).

A likelihood ratio for a given test result is the likelihood of that result in a person with the disease divided by the likelihood of the same test result in someone without the disease (LR = [P(result/disease)]/[P(result/no disease)]). For this discussion, the "result" is the WBC count, and the "disease" is bacteremia. For example, 48 of the 127 patients with bacteremia had a WBC count of 15-19.99x10⁹L (P[result/disease] = 48/127 = 38%), while 1337 of the 8629 . . . [Full Text of this Article]