Introduction:

Pneumococcal disease affects mainly people in the extreme ages of life. In this sense, "Dr. Antonio María Béguez Caesar" Southern Teaching Pediatric Hospital constitutes a place of centinel surveillance of the Pneumococcus National Project, which served as motivation to develop the present investigation on this disease.

Objective:

To describe the epidemiological, clinical, microbiological and imaging characteristics in patients younger than 5 years admitted due to a pneumoccocical disease.

Methods:

An observational, descriptive and prospective study of 170 patients younger than 5 years admitted to the above mentioned hospital in the period 2014-2016 was carried out, for presenting pneumoccocal disease.

Results:

The early suppression of the maternal feeding (52.3 %) and the presence of coexisting smokers (44.7 %) as main risk factors, besides fever (100.0 %), cough (96.0 %), chest indrawing (74.1 %) and polypnea (70.0 %) as the most frequent symptoms prevailed in the series; while the pneumonia was presented in 82.3 % and there was 10.0 % positiveness to pneumoccocus, by serotypes 19A, 19F, 14 and 6A, with 66.6 % colonization in infants. On the other hand, lethality and proportional mortality for pneumonia were of 2.85 and 8.0 %, respectively, without deaths due to pneumoccocus.

Conclusions:

Pneumoccocus isolation was low, with prevalence in colonized infants and with mortality indicators due to non pneumoccocal pneumonia, which suggests that the short age is a death risk due to this cause.

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