Volume 5 Editor’s Forward

Starting a new journal is always a difficult undertaking, hence it is important to surround yourself with a dedicated team to ensure success. Our Editorial Board has now grown to 31 international members who have spent the last 18 months writing, soliciting and reviewing manuscripts. In particular, two dedicated members of our Editorial Team, Professor Stephen Gordon from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK, and Professor Brian Greenwood from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, were our Guest Editors of the Volume 5 Special Issue on “Pneumonia Diagnosis.” Both have worked energetically to produce this Issue and I thank them for their hard work and dedication in producing a highly valuable volume.

Dan Gower Wootton of the University of Liverpool and Charles Feldman of the University of Witwatersrand have written an engaging debate which leads the Special Issue. Their entertaining discussion deliberates the diagnostic role of the humble chest radiograph in the context of community-acquired pneumonia.

Stephen Aston from the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility has contributed an excellent review on the role of rapid diagnostic tests in managing adults with pneumonia in low-resource settings. Given the limitations in diagnostic laboratory capability present in most low-resource settings, he suggests that rapid and point-of-care diagnostic tests could become valuable tools to guide treatment decisions.

Antonia Ho, also of the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme, has written a fantastic review on the epidemiology, aetiology, diagnosis and management of viral pneumonia in Sub-Saharan Africa and highlighted the difficulty in the interpretation of positive results from highly sensitive polymerase chain reaction tests.

Jamie Rylance from the University of Liverpool and Peter Waitt from Warrington Hospital, UK, have contributed a high-quality review focused on the use and applicability of severity scores to patients with community-acquired pneumonia in resource-poor settings; challenging clinical researchers working in such systems to consider the generalisability of existing severity scores in their populations.

Kerry-Ann O’Grady from the Queensland Children’s Medical Research Institute, Queensland University of Technology, Paul Torzillo from the University of Sydney, Kieran Frawley from the Royal Children’s Hospital Brisbane and Anne Chang from the Menzies School of Health Research, Charles Darwin University, review the role of radiology in the diagnosis of paediatric pneumonia, concluding that large population-based studies are needed in different populations to address many of the knowledge gaps in the radiological diagnosis of pneumonia in children.

To wrap up an excellent Volume, Jukka Räsänen from the Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Noam Gavriely from Karmel Medical Israel, have written a review of a unique project which aims at bridging the childhood pneumonia diagnostic gap using emerging technology such as sensors installed on mobile “smart” phones, which essentially turn the devices into a rapid data collection and transmission unit which is then fed back to a central location to confirm pneumonia diagnosis.

I thank you all for your outstanding contributions to Volume 5 and invite readers to make commentary on pneumonia diagnosis for publication through Letters to the Editor-in-Chief.