Simplified antibiotic regimens for treating neonates and young infants with severe infections in the Democratic Republic of Congo: a comparative efficacy trial.

One-quarter of neonatal and infant deaths are due to infection, and the majority of these deaths occur in developing countries. Standard treatment for infection, which includes parenteral treatment only, is often not available in low-resource settings. Infant mortality will not be reduced in developing countries without a reduction in deaths due to infection. We participated in a multi-site trial that demonstrated the effectiveness of three simplified antibiotic regimens compared to standard treatment (The AFRINEST Trial: parent study). For this report, we examined the site-specific data for the Democratic Republic Congo (DRC), the most impoverished of the countries that participated in the study, to determine if outcomes in the DRC were similar to outcomes across all sites.