Jean A Klastersky

2014

Historical perspectives: why empirical therapy?
The relationship between neutropenia and the risk of severe infection in patients with cancer has been clearly established early in the 1960s by Bodey et al [1]. At that time, Gram-negative bacteremia in neutropenic patients with cancer (most often with acute leukemia) carried an exceedingly high mortality of 90% [2]. More specifically, it was shown that sepsis due to Pseudomonas aeruginosa or Escherichia coli was lethal in about half of cases within 48 hours after the first blood culture had been taken [3].