Bacterial meningitis is a severe infection of the central nervous system.1 Transient or permanent deafness, or other neurological sequelae, arise in up to one third of survivors.2 3 A meta-analysis on outcome in bacterial meningitis including 19 studies with 4920 children showed that hearing impairment occurs in 11% and that this rate varies with the causative organism.4

In 2007, results were reported from a prospective randomised controlled trial in children aged from 2 months to 16 years from Latin America comparing the effect of adjunctive intravenous dexamethasone or oral glycerol in a factorial design.5 Although results showed that oral glycerol prevented severe neurological sequelae, the study was controversial because of several methodological flaws.6 A 2×2 design …