Volume 4 • Issue 3 • 1000212 J Trop Dis ISSN: 2329-891X JTD, an open access journal Research Article Open Access Sricharoenchai et al., J Trop Dis 2016, 4:3 http://dx.doi.org/10.4172/2329-891X.1000212 Review Article Open Access Journal of Tropical Diseases J o u r n a l o f T r o p ic a l D is e a s e s & P u b l i c H e a l t h ISSN: 2329-891X Epidemiology of Respiratory Syncytial Virus Lower Respiratory Tract Infection (RSV-LRTI) In Children in Developing Countries Sirintip Sricharoenchai 1,2* , Emanuela Palla 3 , Franco Laghi Pasini 4 and Melvin Sanicas 1,5 1 Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, Università di Siena, Italy 2 Pediatric Infectious Diseases Unit, Siriraj, Mahidol University, Thailand 3 Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics, Siena, Italy 4 Department of Medicine, Surgery and Neuroscience, Università di Siena, Italy 5 Global Health, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA, USA Corresponding author: Dr Sirintip Sricharoenchai, Pediatric Infectious Diseases Unit, Department of Pediatrics, Siriraj Hospital Mahidol University, 2 Prannok Road, Bangkok 10700, Thailand, Tel: 66-2-866-0944; E-mail: sirintipsri@gmail.com Received February 16, 2016; Accepted April 09, 2016; Published April 16, 2016 Citation: Sricharoenchai S, Palla E, Pasini FL, Sanicas M (2016) Epidemiology of Respiratory Syncytial Virus Lower Respiratory Tract Infection (RSV-LRTI) In Children in Developing Countries. J Trop Dis 4: 212. doi:10.4172/2329- 891X.1000212 Copyright: © 2016 Sricharoenchai S, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Keywords: Respiratory syncytial virus; RSV; Lower respiratory tract infection; Children; Developing countries Introduction Lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) is the leading global cause of death in children between 1 month and 5 years of age. Nearly 70% of LRTI deaths under ive years old are among children in developing countries [1-4]. Clinical characteristics of RSV infection include upper respiratory infection with rhinorrhea and nasal congestion lasting between 7 and 12 days. Re-infection rates vary between 6% and 83% each year, showing that initial infection does not confer immunity to succeeding infection [5]. By the age of 2 years, nearly all children have had RSV infection [6]. More serious disease involving the lower respiratory tract may develop in older children especially in immunocompromised and cardiopulmonary disease patients [7,8]. he review aimed to systematically aggregate and analyze published epidemiological data on RSV lower respiratory tract infection in young children in developing countries, in order to ascertain the burden of the disease for evidence-based public health priorities and to summarize the currently available data and identify the gaps and scope for further epidemiological study of RSV lower respiratory tract infection in developing countries. Literature Reviewed Potentially relevant published articles were identiied through literature searches of the following bibliographic database: Pubmed database, Web of knowledge, and Embase. To access publications from developing countries that might not be included in those databases, searches in Scielo, Indian Medlars Centre, Bioline International, and African Journals online were also performed. he following combination of MesH terms (Medical Subject Heading term) and individual search terms were used: (Respiratory Syncytial Viruses OR pneumonia OR bronchiolitis OR respiratory tract infections) AND (developing country OR each individual country of developing Abstract he global estimate in 2005 indicate that at least 33.8 million episodes of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) associated acute lower respiratory infection (ALRI) occurred worldwide in children younger than 5 years and most of these deaths occurred in developing countries. he review aimed to analyze published epidemiological data on RSV lower respiratory tract infection in young children in developing countries to ascertain the burden of the disease for evidence-based public health priorities. Articles in English published between 2002 and 2014 were identiied through literature searches in PubMed, Web of knowledge, and Embase. he incidence of RSV-LRTI in Asian countries were lower than African countries except Bangladesh. Rate of hospitalized LRTI was similar in magnitude across all studies. Despite an increasing number of epidemiological studies of RSV-LRTI published over the past 13 years in developing countries, there are still clearly many areas that merit further study. here is still a need to establish further RSV surveillance studies to improve the incidence estimates and to explore the extent to which national and regional variation in RSV infection rates exist in countries where there is a high burden and high mortality attributable to LRTI but lack of understanding of local RSV epidemiology. countries) for the epidemiological review, and (Respiratory Syncytial Viruses AND vaccine) for the review of vaccine development updates. he searches were restricted to studies of human subjects that were published in English between 2002 and 2014. For the purpose of this review, the developing countries were deined as the ones designated as such by either World Bank (low, lower middle and upper middle- income countries) or World Health Organization. For the results of epidemiological review, data extracted from original articles describing incidence, prevalence, and demographic distribution, comorbidities, complications and outcomes, and case fatality rates of RSV infection were tabulated and presented in descriptive form. Results and Discussion Pneumonia is one of the leading causes of childhood mortality. Of the 6.3 million children who died before age 5 years in 2013, infectious diseases caused 51.8% (3.257 million) of them, with the largest percentage due to pneumonia 935,000 deaths (817,000-1,057,000; 14.9% of total deaths, 13.0-16.8%), followed by diarrhea 578,000 deaths (448,000-750,000; 9.2%, 7.1- 11.9) [9] (Figure 1). he global estimate in 2005 indicate that at least 33.8 million episodes of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) associated acute lower respiratory infection (ALRI)