Challenges of Antibiotic Formulations and Administration in the Treatment of Bloodstream Infections in Children Under Five Admitted to Kisantu Hospital, Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Disclosures: R. R. is the chair of the institutional review board of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. Her involvement is the study started well after the ethical approval of the TreNTS study protocol.: The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available because of the sensitive nature of the study data. Requests to access the data can be made to ITM’s contact point for data access ITMresearchdataaccess@itg.be. All requests will be reviewed for approval by ITMs Data Access Committee. After approval, data sharing will be managed by the same committee."

"We are grateful to the TreNTS research team for their dedicated patient enrollment, data collection, and patient follow-up. We also thank all clinical, laboratory, and research staff from Kisantu Hospital, Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale, and International Vaccine Institute for their collaboration during their routine clinical care and microbiological surveillance activities. We also thank the hospital management and local health authorities; their involvement, support and insights have been crucial for this study. Finally, we thank the unit of Tropical Bacteriology, the Clinical Trial Unit at Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) and the ITM office in Kinshasa for their support in writing procedures, clinical study management and support in logistics and accountancy. We thank Inge Van Cauwenberg for her support to the project administration and management. Financial Disclosure This research was funded by the Belgian Directorate of Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD) through Framework Agreement between the Belgian DGD and the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Belgium. B.T. has a scholarship from Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, 1153220N and 1153222N) and received a research grant for the study “Treating Non-typhoidal Salmonella Bloodstream Infections in Children Under-five in DR Congo: a Cohort Study (TreNTS)” from the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) in 2020. Part of the blood culture surveillance activities were supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation project OPP1127988 funded to International Vaccine Institute. This study has also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Vacc-iNTS project, grant agreement No. 815439. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."