Key Words

complications W Antimicrobial agents Major advances in cancer therapy result from development of multidrug chemotherapy regimens. Besides death from tumor pro-gression, infections are currently one of the major causes of mortality and morbidity. Be-cause of the risk of complications and mortal-ity, the treatment for febrile neutropenia is admission to hospital and administration of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Response rates of initial antimicrobial treatment vary consid-erably (40–92%). Due to the heterogeneity of populations in randomized studies, compari-son of efficacy and identification of risk fac-tors is limited. This is the main reason why the European Society of Biomodulation and Chemotherapy (ESBiC) is conducting a sur-veillance study that concentrates more on the evaluation of risk factors than on the ther-apeutic outcome of prospective randomized antimicrobial regimens: European Surveil-lance of Infections in Cancer Patients (ESIC). The present contribution is to determine which cancer patients are at low risk for fever, and can benefit from first-line treat-ment with treatment options such as mono-therapy as well as on an outpatient basis