There's A Lot of It About: Acute Respiratory Infections in Primary Care

Forewords by Chris Del Mar and James Hutchinson Respectively Dean, Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University, Australia; Chief of Infectious Diseases Control, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada '>Like most young family doctors starting work in the community, I was at first surprised by the number of people who came to see me suffering from acute respiratory tract infections (ARIs). In winter, they made up to a third of my patients and even in summer they were a fifth of all the people who visited me. Most of these people did not have the infectious diseases that I had seen and been taught about when a medical student and a house officer. There was little meningitis, pneumonia and hepatitis here - just a steady stream of people of all ages and colours, complaining of flu, colds, sore throats, earaches, coughs, sinuses and sniffles.'' Graham Worrall, in the Introduction