Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Pneumonia

Pneumonia[edit]

Partial self-nomination. This is an article we've worked on at the Medicine Collaboration of the Week, and the topic certainly merits a featured-standard article. We've been working hard on this article and feel it has improved significantly. It has had a peer review which can be read here. --WS 11:50, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - the history section skips the middle ages without explanation. Also, from the definition in the lead section I don't see why non-human animals cannot get pneumonia. Unless the disease is, by definition, restricted to Homo sapiens, we need something on that. --Oldak Quill 23:19, 14 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the comments! Not to be flippant, but not much happened from antiquity to the 19th century in the diagnosis and treatment of pneumonia. I expanded the section to reflect the mastery of the clinical exam prior to the modern era. As for pneumonia, it can certainly happen in any animal with lungs, as far as I understand it. Although I've thought about it before, we've never had to address it in any of the medical articles. We'll have to put our heads together and figure out a good solution to this one! InvictaHOG 11:47, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If someone writes an article about pneumonia in animals, a link could be added at the top of the article. I don't think it is necessary to talk about animals in this article, but maybe a short mention of it as long as there is no seperate article would be appropriate. --WS 15:09, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I too think that a disambiguation link should be included when the manifestations of pneumonia in animals are documented. In the meantime, I've added a line to the first paragraph discussing animal vs. human pneumonia. Let me know if this helps. Thanks again for the comments! InvictaHOG 18:17, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Object. Only one issue: the rapid-fire one-paragraph subsections in the "Types of pneumonia" section. Looks like a powerpoint presentation; I'd suggest just combining sections and introducing the types in prose rather than with subheaders. Other than that, I think this article is good to go; very nice. (Though I must say I hate seeing the phrase "this article" in an article, which was recently introduced in the header. I can't think of a great way out of it here, though.) —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 20:48, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comments! It's funny, we'd actually fixed up those types of pneumonia sections but it was reverted in copyediting. I agree and I put it back the way it was! InvictaHOG 21:16, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, it's those well-intentioned edits that get you every time. Support. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 21:57, 15 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

~~Object~~, I have a few concerns. (1) The lead doesn't really do the content of the article justice, it should be more of a summary of the whole article, the self referential sentence added to the lead also needs to be reworked. To get around it a section on pneumonia in non-humans could probably knocked togther pretty easily. (2) It is not immediately apparent why causes, types and pathophysiology are in separate sections- as the causes section just seems to summarise the subsequent types and pathophysiology sections. (3) The prognosis section is rather choppy, the short paragraphs should probably be merged since they all address the same point- also are there statistics for mortailty from ohter parts of the world available?--nixie 13:10, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the input! I made a few changes with more planned later. There are no statistics for most of the world for adult pneumonia. The WHO stats for childhood pneumonia are included. The rates of death are higher, however, and I've incorporated that into the prognosis section along with reasons. The "causes" section attempts to outline the microorganisms responsible for pneumonia and make sense of later classification. I've changed the header to reflect this and will go through the whole article later looking for redundency. The "types" section introduces several quite different concepts leading up to the clinical categorization. I'm not sure about the overlap between that and the micro section aside from the obvious inclusion of the microbiology classification. As for the pathophysiology, I originally felt it was important to separate the identification of organisms from the overall way that they cause disease. However, I'm open to merging the sections and will take a closer look at doing that. As for the animals, I'm not too pleased with this set-up. I will look into creating a new page for this section so that it can be referenced at the top as discussed on the MCOW page. I don't think that just providing a paragraph within this article does the subject justice! There's absolutely no way that I can see to generalize across species when presenting pneumonia... InvictaHOG 14:03, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The changes that you've made have already cleared up a lot of the duplication of information. About my suggestion for animals- don't get me wrong, I think this article should be about humans, but it should include a couple of sentences in summary style that could mention that most common aminals get pneumonia and the causes are similar to those of human pneumonia and provide a link to an article on pneumonia in other animals, not essential now, but it'd be a good addition to the article at some point in the future, the Merk veterinary manual is probably a good place to start. Support as is.--nixie 23:19, 17 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have begun a non-human pneumonia page and placed a link to it at the top of the pneumonia page. InvictaHOG 00:10, 18 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. Hello, I just thought I'd comment on the issue of veterinary lung infections. It's a very understandable view, but IMHO, impossible to action. There is such an enormous diversity of etiologic agents, pathophysiologic mechanisms, treatments and epidemiologic data simply for pneumonia in humans alone—witness the extent of supporting articles—that trying to write about the pneumonias of every other lung-equipped animal, in this one article, is IMHO difficult as well as undesirable. I agree with the other doctors here that the quality of the article would suffer if we tried. Veterinary pneumonias deserve (a) separate article(s), the form, detail and extent of which should be left to editors expert in this area. Very kind regards encephalon 14:27, 17 November 2005 (UTC) (COI: I contributed considerably to this article in the past).[reply]

Hello. Looks very nice. Will make a good feature article. I added three sentences in the prevention section about screening pregnant women for Group B Strep and Chlamydia to prevent pneumonia in infants, and suction of infants with mec-fluid to prevent aspiration pneumonia.--FloNight 01:08, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the contributions! They fit nicely. I'm planning to create a neonatal pneumonia page and expand the Meconium aspiration page, hopefully you can help! InvictaHOG 02:04, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My dad is currently in hospital with Pneumonia. Support - this told me a lot about it! - Ta bu shi da yu 05:11, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]