SCRUB TYPHUS IN NEONATES

Sepsis is one of the important cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality in a tertiary care hospital. Though most of these newborns will respond to appropriate antibiotics with good outcome few may not respond. Here we are going to discuss two newborns who presented with clinical features of sepsis, treated with higher antibiotics but not responded and where the alternative diagnosis had to be considered. As these babies had fever, hepatosplenomegaly with thrombocytopenia and refractory shock, we thought of unusual infections like leptospirosis, scrub typhus, dengue and empirically started on azithromycin. To our surprise their serology where found to be positive for scrub typhus and both these babies recovered well with azithromycin.