Background
viral infection
VIRAL INFECTION
Examining a feverish child is part of daily practice for general practitioners (GPs), paediatricians and emergency physicians. In most cases, it concerns a mild, often viral infection with a favourable natural course [To aid doctors in clinical decision-making, several clinical prediction models (CPMs) have been developed. CPMs calculate the risk of SI from different variables such as demographic factors, medical history, clinical examination, general clinical impression and physician’s gut feeling something is wrong; in some CPMs, point-of-care (POC) tests are included as well [Deriving CPMs has an inherent risk of overfitting, where the prediction is fitted too strongly to the original derivation data. Consequently, the model underperforms in populations differing from the original derivation cohort, necessitating the external validation of CPMs in independent populations [A previous external validation study of CPMs for acutely ill children in ambulatory care found promising rule-out values, with still a percentage of residual uncertainty [