Forster J, Piazza G, Goettler D, et al. - Researchers aimed at analyzing prehospital antibiotic therapy (PH-ABT) of children with complications of community-acquired pneumonia, namely parapneumonic pleural effusion and pleural empyema (PPE/PE). In addition, they investigated its effects on clinical outcome and pathogen detection. They performed prospective nationwide active surveillance in Germany between October 2010 and June 2018. Of 1,724 reported children with PPE/PE, 556 (32.3% of 1,719 with available data) received PH-ABT. PH-ABT was identified correlated with significantly decreased overall rate of bacterial pathogen detection by culture, but not by polymerase chain reaction. A lower rate of infectious complications but no effect on overall duration of disease was observed in correlation with receiving PH-ABT. Hence, it is speculated that the duration of PPE/PE is mainly linked with an infection-induced inflammatory process, which can only partially be affected by antibiotic treatment.