Molecular detection of respiratory viruses: an observational study on respiratory co-infections in children and...

Respiratory tract infection (RTI) is the most important cause of visiting both public and private medical care services. During the decade preceding Covid-19, in developing countries, there was a gap in the epidemiology of respiratory viral infections, probably due to the difficulty of detecting viral agents in clinical microbiology laboratories routine, at that time. In this context, the aim of this study was to describe the occurrence of virus, demographic factors associated and the likelihood of coinfections detection by multiplex PCR methods. The target also was to determine the involvement of respiratory viruses other than SARS-CoV-2 as agents of upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs) using rapid respiratory panels by multiplex real time PCR with flow chip methodology. Samples of SARSs patients, 530 in total, were tested between 2022 and 2023, obtained from nasopharyngeal swabs, nasopharyngeal exudates or nasopharyngeal aspirates. Of 530 tests, 30% was human rhinovirus, the most prevalent, followed by respiratory syncytial virus B (21.5%) and human adenovirus (17.4%). Among the total of positive samples, 83.8% belonged to patients aged between 0 and 10 years, 62.6% of whom were aged between 1 and 10 years. Multiple virus detection was found in 50.4% of the samples tested, 93.1% of which were from patients under the age of 18. Viral co-infection was evident in the finding and was higher (88.7%) in patients under the age of 18 yeas.