ABSTRACT
Antibiotics are today an accepted mode of therapy in the management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) (1-6). Since the beginning of this century, scientists have postulated that exacerbations of chronic bronchitis were caused by infectious microorganisms (7). In the 1950s it was reported that there was an association between exacerbation of chronic bronchitis and the recovery of Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pneumoniae from the sputum (8).
