[Comment] Reducing just-in-case primary care antibiotic prescribing in children

00:00 - 25 Sep 2025

As health-care workers around the world will attest, infections are extremely common in children in primary care and community settings.1,2 In The Lancet, Jan Yvan Verbakel and colleagues' pragmatic, cluster-randomised, controlled trial (ARON),3 set in a high-income primary care system, reports the culmination of years of rigorous research by a team seeking what many said was impossible: to safely rule out serious infection in children who present with acute illness to primary care, where its incidence is around 1%,4 without giving children unnecessary antibiotics or increasing hospital referrals.