Response to maternal and neonatal risk factors associated with vertical transmission of ophthalmia neonatorum in neonates receiving health care in Blantyre, Malawi.

Sir,

In response to the letter to the editor regarding the publication written by Ranjit et al.1 thank you for your comments. I would like to clarify a few of the aforementioned points in the letter. The maternal and neonatal risk factor data were collected by chart review. This was a retrospective study as noted in the original article, and the purpose was to determine the risk factors associated with ophthalmia neonatorum in Blantyre, Malawi. Although a case-control study would have provided different statistical associations and allowed for a prevalence calculation, this was not the purpose of the study. The purpose was to document the risk factors in a retrospective fashion by examining the medical charts from January 2006 to December 2009. The exact microbial etiology was not published in the article because it was not consistently documented in the medical charts. Given the time that ophthalmia neonatorum presented in our sample of patients, the etiology was most likely vertically transmitted from mother to neonate, which was discussed as a proposed mechanism in the original article by Ranjit et al. and discussed in published literature cited in the article by Ranjit et al. as well. Thank you for the comments that allowed to elaborate further on the study.