In this issue of the European Journal of Internal Medicine, Tolosa-Ridao and colleagues address a deceptively simple but clinically consequential question: should asymptomatic bacteriuria detected before chemotherapy in high-risk haematological patients be screened for and treated to prevent urinary-source bacteremia during febrile neutropenia? [1] Their answer, based on a prospective observational cohort, is cautious but clinically relevant: in this setting, untreated baseline asymptomatic bacteriuria was uncommon-to-moderately frequent, rarely evolved into bacteremia caused by the same organism, and was not associated with poorer outcomes during febrile neutropenia.
