Pneumocystis carinii Pneumonitis Occurring in an Adopted Korean Infant

GENERALLY THOUGHT to be a protozoan,Pneumocystis cariniihas been known for many decades to be the cause of a specific infection of the lung,P cariniipneumonitis. In Europe,P cariniipneumonitis is known to occur predominantly in debilitated and premature infants six weeks to a few months of age, and has been encountered primarily in epidemics in nurseries, resulting in many deaths.1,2Deamer and Zollinger3brought this condition to the attention of North American physicians in 1953. In 1956, Gagne and Hould4presented the first three cases from Canada and since then, an increasingly large number of cases have been recognized in the North American continent. The condition had not been reported in the Far East until 1959, when Lim5recorded an epidemic of 30 cases in infants occurring in a Korean orphanage. In 1960, Lim and Moon6presented epidemiologic and clinical studies