Bacterial infections in children with HIV/AIDS.

HIV/AIDS affects over 850,000 children in Africa. Bacterial infections are frequent in this group of children. Pneumonia, meningitis and septicaemia are especially common, recurrent and most often caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae. Salmonella spp are the most frequently isolated causative agent of septicaemia in malarial areas. Soft tissue, eye and oral infections have a higher incidence in HIV-infected than uninfected children. In all instances the causative agents are not dissimilar from those that cause disease in HIV-uninfected children, but the mortality is greater. Increased bacterial resistance to first line antibiotics has been reported and the use of cotrimoxazole prophylaxis may further influence the resistance pattern of common bacteria.