Pneumonies communautaires non graves : la recherche d'une documentation microbiologique n'est pas nécessaire

Microbiological diagnosis of infectious diseases must be searched for when easily available, with reliable results that will have an impact on patient management. These criteria do not apply for community-acquired pneumonia: (i) reliable samples most often require invasive testings (e.g. broncho-alveolar lavage through fibroscopy); (ii) on the other hand, non invasive tests suffer from multiple caveats (low sensitivity and/or low specificity, delayed diagnosis, cost) and (iii) the benefit of targeted treatment as compared to empirical treatment has not been demonstrated. Consequently, all recent guidelines rely on empirical treatment for non-severe community-acquired pneumonia, based on rigourous analysis of the clinical situation.