Virologic study of acute lower respiratory tract infections in children admitted to the paediatric department of Blida University Hospital, Algeria

Derrar, F.; Izri, K.; Kaddache, C.; Boukari, R.; Hannoun, D.

One virus was identified in the majority of children. The positivity rate observed (82.9%) was high-higher, in fact, than in many similar studies, which found it to range from 35% to 78% [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] . Bezerra et al. [14] found a comparable positivity rate (85.5%) in 407 children younger than 5 with acute upper or lower respiratory tract infection. The high rate observed in our study was partly due to the fact that this was a prospective study conducted by nasal sampling with good cost-effectiveness [15] , most often in infants with severe ALRTI during the season corresponding to the peak of viral respiratory infections. This high virus detection rate may reflect the environment in which these children live, where viruses circulate in abundance as a result of family size and promiscuity. The viruses most frequently detected are RSV (48%), HRV (23%), HMPV (22%), adenovirus (7.5%) and influenza (5%). RSV is the most frequently implicated, regardless of the clinical picture, followed by HRV, then HMPV. The distribution of viruses observed in this survey is comparable to that already reported in the literature [11, 16, 17] .