Ángel Hernández Merino
Pediatrician and collaborator of the Advisory Committee on Vaccines, the Spanish Association of Pediatrics and the Spanish Association of Primary Care Pediatrics
The data now published highlight the importance of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in child health. It is one of the main micro-organisms causing illness (lower respiratory tract infection and respiratory failure) and deaths in children under 5 years of age.
The data provided are very expressive: it has been estimated that, worldwide, in 2019, 3.6 million hospital admissions and 26,300 hospital deaths occurred due to RSV lower respiratory tract infection.
Three issues are highly relevant: almost half of cases occur in infants under 6 months of age; only one in four RSV deaths in children under 5 years of age occur in hospital; and more than 95% of hospital admissions and deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.
These issues set the priorities for developing strategies to mitigate the impact of RSV: children under 6 months of age and settings with difficult access to quality medical care and weakened health systems.
It should be noted that: 1) even in well-resourced countries, reducing the impact of RSV infections would have an important benefit in terms of avoiding substantial medical and social costs;
2) given that effective (antiviral) treatments for RSV are not available, prevention strategies become more important;
and 3) that it should also be considered that reducing the incidence of RSV infections in the paediatric population could have an indirect effect on the burden of disease in the elderly, who are, together with young children, the two population groups most vulnerable to RSV.