Rare case of infective aortitis with aortic rupture and cardiac tamponade in a young child.

Aortitis and aortic dissection are very rare in children. The clinical presentation of aortitis varies across a spectrum, ranging from incidental findings to fatal aortic dissection and rupture. A high index of suspicion is needed to establish an accurate and timely diagnosis. Here, we present an unfortunate case of fatal infective aortitis with aortic rupture and cardiac tamponade in a healthy toddler. Postmortem report implicated Kingella kingae as the causative organism of aortic pseudoaneurysm and rupture, leading to the instantaneous death of the child.

Single-centre telephone survey on patients' perspectives regarding remote paediatric outpatient consultations in a district general hospital.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, remote consultations became a new norm for paediatric outpatient clinics. The objective of this survey was to find patients' perspective on telephone consultations. 200 patients, who had remote consultations since April 2020, were surveyed and their responses were analysed. Almost half (98/200) of the patients or their parents preferred remote consultations mixed with face-to-face consultations; only a fifth (40/200) preferred exclusively face-to-face consultations; and approximately a third (62/200) preferred exclusively remote consultations. In conclusion, remote consultations are becoming a popular choice for patients, although there are limitations, especially in the context of safeguarding.

Note: A new optical method for the detection of bubble nucleation in superheated droplet detector.

A superheated droplet detector (SDD) consists of a large number of micron-sized superheated liquid drops suspended in a gel medium. The vaporization of a superheated drop is associated with the emission of an acoustic signal. A novel optical method is developed for the detection of this acoustic signal. In this method, a probe-bubble picks up the acoustic signal, and the oscillation of the probe-bubble is detected by employing a laser and phototransistor. The method can detect vaporization of an individual superheated drop in real-time and can be used for studying the response of SDDs to ionizing radiations.