The goal of a new study published in Acta Medica Portuguesa was to characterize invasive pneumococcal disease in a Portuguese pediatric hospital before the universal use of vaccine. In this retrospective study, medical records of all children with Streptococcus pneumoniae were analyzed from January 1995 to June 2015. The findings revealed that during the study period, 112 invasive pneumococcal disease cases were identified in patients with a median age of 15 months (1 month - 15 years). The median number of cases per year was 4; the highest being between 2001-2002 (8 per year) and 2007-2012 (7-11 per year). A majority of the diagnoses were confirmed through blood culture (72), cerebrospinal fluid (24), pleural fluid (11), and other methods (5). The most frequent diagnoses were pneumonia (38%), occult bacteremia (34%), and meningitis (21%). Furthermore, during this period, an increase in the number of pneumonia cases and slight increase in occult bacteremia with meningitis cases remained relatively unchanged. It was inferred that the increase in isolates from pneumonia and occult bacteremia might have occurred due to the introduction of molecular biological methods for Streptococcus pneumoniae detection. It was stated that the results of this analysis, before universal vaccination, will be useful in the evaluation of the impact of vaccination in the Portuguese pediatric population.