Meningococcal Disease and the Non-Blanching Rash — Board-Style Questions

What this deck covers

Meningococcal Disease and the Non-Blanching Rash in 18 board-style clinical cases with worked explanations. Each case gives you a clinical vignette, four options, the correct answer, and an explanation of why each of the other three is wrong, with the guideline or textbook it follows named on the answer.

Board-style teaching questions for paediatricians and trainees preparing for paediatric board, MRCPCH and licensing examinations. Written from published guidelines and standard paediatric textbooks, with the source named on every answer.

The 18 cases, in order

1. Sore legs and cold feet
2. A rash that disappears under pressure
3. What the tumbler can prove
4. Spots only above the line
5. Which of the two is worse
6. Skin that has gone dusky
7. Whether the bloods come first
8. Borrowing a drug from elsewhere
9. When to make the call
10. Who the school antibiotics reach
11. A complete record of injections
12. Why it happened twice
13. When the knife comes out
14. Only two of them
15. Nothing in the bag
16. After the tablets are given
17. Why the pattern moved
18. What the headlines do not say

Diagnoses and management options tested

Across the 18 cases you are asked to choose between options such as: As a viral myositis, Early meningococcal disease, Wait for the inflammatory markers, Only if a second case appears, It halves the likelihood, The terminal part of the complement pathway, Give an oral antibiotic now, Improved laboratory methods.

Clinical pearls from this deck

• Ask about leg pain and feel the feet. Both come hours before anything appears on the skin.
• Mark the edge of the rash and look again in an hour. This one moves.
• A one-way test. It can send them in; it must never keep them out.
• Draw a line at the nipples. Above it, in a well afebrile child after vomiting, is the benign one.
• No neck stiffness is not reassurance here. It may mean the worse of the two forms.
• Draw round the edges with a pen. You will know within the hour how fast this is moving.

Work through the deck once for recognition, then again a week later to test yourself — each question gives the answer and explains why every other option fails.

More from this system: all Infectious Disease case decks · pediatric reference values.