Meningitis as a major contributing factor to mortality

Meningitis continues to be a leading cause of mortality, especially in regions with high prevalence of HIV (1). Although their main objective was to address predictors of mortality in a community in sub-Saharan Africa with high prevalence of HIV, Tenforde and colleagues’ retrospective study also draws attention to this continued gap in care for patients in these settings (2). The study surveys retrospectively both culture positive and culture negative meningitis and provides the CSF parameters of 3,186 adult patients and their correlation with mortality. In their report, almost half of all patients evaluated died within 1 year of lumbar puncture (LP) despite 2,900 of the 3,186 patients having negative cultures.