Prevalence and Seasonal Distribution of Respiratory Viruses During the 2014 - 2015 Season in Istanbul

Goktas, Safak; Sirin, Mumtaz Cem

It was reported that the high co-infection prevalence of AdV and HBoV may have resulted from asymptomatic persistence, prolonged nasopharyngeal shedding, or a tendency to infect or colonize in the presence of other viruses (9, 14, 18, 25) . Similarly, Byington et al. (22) found that the detection of HBoV was not associated with clinical symptoms in 54% of cases. On the other hand, although nasopharyngeal samples were suggested to reveal reliable results for detecting viral agents, the findings described above may indicate that pathogen detection in the nasopharynx may not accurately represent the situation in the lower respiratory tract (14, 17, 18) . Moreover, the possibility of contamination during sample collection or analysis could not be excluded, and this should be kept in mind in clinical evaluations. Assessment of viral load may be a better choice in the interpretation of positive co-infection results, but it has been reported that more studies would be required to clarify the potential value of quantitative test results (9) . In addition, in most studies, it has been suggested that the presence of more than one pathogen in a respiratory sample did not affect the clinical presentation of ARTIs, but the relationship between co-infection and severity of disease remains debatable (4, (13) (14) (15) 19) .