Human Bocavirus: Lessons Learned to Date

Schildgen, Oliver

If one tries to follow the history of virus discoveries during the last decade and has performed clinical studies in the field of respiratory infections, it is obvious that with the increasing number of identified pathogens, the range of diagnostic tools required in a clinical study has also increased. Thus, the more known viruses there are, the more diagnostic assays are demanded by investigators, clinicians, and peer reviewers of the manuscripts that describe those studies. It thus remains unknown whether HBoV is in fact a pathogen or whether the co-detection rate was high because clinical studies on HBoV infections were among the first generation of studies in which the presence of virtually all respiratory pathogens was required to be assessed.