Letters to the Editor

We did not state and we certainly did not mean to imply that patients with purulent pericarditis should be treated only with antibiotics. We agree with Drs Bass and Kaplan that surgery is an essential part of therapy; in fact, one of the references they cite supporting the need for surgical drainage is from this department. We only speculated that, if the small effusions detected by our survey were infectious in origin, they must have been incipient infections aborted by antibiotic therapy since no patient progressed to symptomatic purulent pericarditis.