A prospective, community-based study on virologic assessment among elderly people with and without symptoms of acute respiratory infection

Abstract

This study supports the importance of rhinovirus infections in community-dwelling elderly persons, whereas asymptomatic elderly persons can also harbor pathogens as detected by PCR, and thus might be a source of infection for their environment.

Influenza-like illness criteria were poorly related to laboratory-confirmed influenza in a sentinel surveillance study

“…Our results show that more than half of the laboratoryconfirmed influenza cases were in patients Ͻ15 years old; elderly people had the lowest rates of influenza. An explanation for this may be the high vaccination coverage (65.6%) and/or the higher implication of other viruses on respiratory infections in the later group as recently reported [12].…”

Two Outbreaks of Severe Respiratory Disease in Nursing Homes Associated with Rhinovirus

“…Although rhinovirus ribonucleic acid (RNA) is frequently recovered from asymptomatic children, 26,27 it is infrequently recovered from asymptomatic elderly persons. In two studies, rhinovirus RNA was recovered in 32% to 52% of ill elderly persons and in only 2% to 3% of asymptomatic controls 20,28 …”

Molecular characterization of a variant rhinovirus from an outbreak associated with uncommonly high mortality

“…Several reports have documented the importance of rhinovirus infection among elderly patients (Falsey et al, 1992(Falsey et al, , 1997(Falsey et al, , 2002Graat et al, 2003) and recently, there has also been increasing evidence of rhinovirus-related mortalities among this group in long-term care facilities (Drinka et al, 1999;Hicks et al, 2006;Louie et al, 2005b;Nicholson et al, 1996;Wald et al, 1995). Nursing homes represent an ideal environment for dissemination of infectious diseases (Strausbaugh et al, 2003).…”