All 11 candidate SNPs in 6 genes (TLR2, TLR4, Dectin-1, DC-SIGN, PTX3, L-Ficolin) have been described earlier to contribute to infectious events such as sepsis, pneumonia and IFD [5, 7–10, 12, 16, 25, 35–37]. This evidence concerns the gene PTX3 and pneumonia.