Podcast 877: Viral Respiratory Infections in Children
Emergency Medical Minute
English - November 13, 2023 11:00 - 3 minutes - 7.23 MB - ★★★★★ - 221 ratingsMedicine Health & Fitness health education emergency emergencymedicine medical medicine science Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Contributor: Jared Scott MD
Educational Pearls
A recently published study assessed the burden of respiratory viruses in a longitudinal cohort of children from 0 to 2 years of age
The children in the study received nasal swab PCR testing weekly to determine infectivity
They were also monitored for symptoms via weekly text surveys
The study differentiated between infection and illness by defining an acute respiratory illness (ARI) as fever ≥38°C or cough.
The median infectivity rate was 9.4 viral infections per child per year
The median illness rate was 3.3 ARIs per child per year
The most common etiological viruses isolated from the nasal samples were rhinovirus and enterovirus
Most infections were asymptomatic or mild
References
Teoh, Z., Conrey, S., McNeal, M., Burrell, A., Burke, R. M., Mattison, C., McMorrow, M., Payne, D. C., Morrow, A. L., & Staat, M. A. (2023). Burden of Respiratory Viruses in Children Less Than 2 Years Old in a Community-based Longitudinal US Birth Cohort. Clinical infectious diseases: an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, 77(6), 901–909. https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciad289
Summarized by Jorge Chalit, OMSII | Edited by Meg Joyce & Jorge Chalit, OMSII