CRP and infection: Moreover, we showed that 51% of patients with culture-negative suspected infection episodes nevertheless had CRP responses which were indistinguishable from those with culture-positive infection [5], highlighting the fact that many of these episodes are likely to be genuine infection where a pathogen was not detected, for example because insufficient amount of blood cultured or the infection was localised rather than in the blood stream [23–25], or because prior antibiotics prevented blood cultures from being positive.