There is now a considerable body of evidence showing that immune and inflammatory responses to Pneumocystis can have harmful as well as beneficial effects on host lungs. Another reason why the mortality rate of PCP without HIV remains high is presumably that it is difficult to diagnose PCP according to nonspecific signs, symptoms and/or no reliable culture. Bollée et al. documented that the leading symptoms of PCP in HIV-uninfected cancer patients were fever (85.7%), dyspnea (78.6%), cough (57.1%), and all three symptoms (44.6%) on diagnosis [5] , and 14.3% of the patients showed only one symptom. In our study, 4 out of 21 patients (19%) were asymptomatic. In addition, 6/21 patients (28.6%) showed abnormality in chest X-ray on admission. It is possible that steroids and immunosuppressive drugs could mask fever and general fatigue on the initial visit. We strongly believe that clinicians are unable to diagnose non-HIV PCP by clinical picture or chest X-ray alone. The association with P. jirovecii cysts has been reported in HIV-uninfected PCP to be one tenth of that in HIV-PCP [4] . Therefore, the sensitivity of conventional staining methods for diagnosis of HIV-uninfected PCP is lower than that for PCP with HIV. Our study demonstrated the sensitivity of conventional staining to be 23.8%. While Diff-Quik staining is highly sensitive, it requires considerable technical expertise [22] . It is likely that physicians are unable to diagnose PCP without HIV soon enough due to the reasons mentioned above.