Treatment of lobar pneumonia in Papua New Guinea: short course chemotherapy with penicillin or chloramphenicol.

In an attempt to reduce the costs of treatment we treated 203 patients with clinical lobar pneumonia either with penicillin or chloramphenicol for periods of up to 24 hours after remission of fever (mean 2.4 days). The results show that for patients with moderately severe pneumonia short-course treatment is as effective as the more traditional treatment. Patients with severe pneumonia may respond to such treatment but require careful evaluation before stopping treatment.