Patient characteristics
Between January 2006 to December 2016, a total of 30,527 oropharyngeal swabs (OPS) and nasopharyngeal swab (NPS) samples were collected from children below five years old at the SARI or ILI surveillance sentinel sites of the DOH of the Philippines. Overall, 1,036 samples were systematically chosen and of these 98.9% (1043/1055) were ILI cases and 1.1% (12/1,055) were SARI cases. RSV infection was detected in 11.8% (122/1,036) of the sample population by real-time RT-PCR.
Demographic characteristics of RSV (122) and non-RSV related (914) cases are compared in Table 1. Among male and female RSV and non-RSV related cases, no significant differences were observed. RSV related cases were and were observed during the first two years of life (<24 months).