Etiological survey on five respiratory viruses among pediatric patients with acute respiratory infections in Urumqi in 2018

Abstract

Objective To analyze the detection results of respiratory viruses in throat swab samples from pediatric patients with acute respiratory infections in Urumqi in 2018, so as to understand the etiological and epidemiological characteristics of the respiratory viruses. Methods Multiple real time fluorescent PCR was used to detect nucleic acids of five common respiratory viruses in 1 935 throat swab samples of pediatric patients with respiratory infections collected from January to December, 2018. The difference of the positive rates in different seasons, ages, genders, and regions was compared. Results For the 1 935 samples, the positive rate of five respiratory viruses was 50.34%. The positive rate of influenza virus nucleic acids (37.73%) was the highest, followed by parainfluenza virus (8.32%). The positive rates of nucleic acids of the other three viruses were about 1%. The differences in the distributions of positive rates of nucleic acids for the five viruses in different genders, ages and seasons were statistically significant. Conclusions Influenza virus and parainfluenza virus were the main pathogens of respiratory tract viral infections among children in Urumqi. The respiratory viral infections among children under 3 years old were more common than that in children of 7-12 years old. The surveillance of respiratory viruses for infants should be strengthened. Key words: Respiratory infection; Respiratory virus; Etiology