Identification and management of Shigella infection in children with diarrhoea: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Shigella infections are a leading cause of diarrhoeal death among children in low-income and middle-income countries. WHO guidelines reserve antibiotics for treating children with dysentery. Reliance on dysentery for identification and management of Shigella infection might miss an opportunity to reduce Shigella-associated morbidity and mortality. We aimed to systematically review and evaluate Shigella-associated and dysentery-associated mortality, the diagnostic value of dysentery for the identification of Shigella infection, and the efficacy of antibiotics for children with Shigella or dysentery, or both. We did three systematic reviews (for mortality, diagnostic value, and antibiotic treatment of Shigella and dysentery), and meta-analyses where appropriate, of studies in resource-limited settings. We searched MEDLINE, Embase, and LILACS database for studies published before Jan 1, 2017, in English, French, and Spanish. We included studies of human beings with diarrhoea and accepted all study-specific definitions of dysentery. For the mortality and diagnostic value searches, we excluded studies that did not include an effect estimate or data necessary to calculate this estimate. The search for treatment included only randomised controlled trials that were done after Jan 1, 1980, and assessed antibiotics in children (aged