Characterising climatic drivers and synergy between common paediatric respiratory viruses in children: guiding prevention and management

Hannah C Moore, Peter Jacoby, Daniel de Klerk, F Janice Lim

The focus of our research is to understand the seasonal patterns of the key viruses that cause chest infections in children. Understanding seasonality is important so prevention measures, like vaccination programs, can be targeted at the appropriate time according to the when the peak viral activity occurs. One of the key viruses we are interested in is Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV).

There is currently no vaccine targeting RSV but a maternal vaccine is likely in the future with late state clinical trials now underway. Different seasonal patterns are seen with RSV in areas with different climates (i.e. temperate in Perth vs tropical in the Kimberley). Our research proposes to investigate the associations with climate factors and viral detections in children using large amounts of data from hospital, laboratory and birth records from 2000-2013 as well as daily weather data from all the weather stations in WA.

We have been focusing on 2 key areas:

1. understanding the climatic data and associations with virus detections and
2. enhancing our mathematical models for disease transmission with respect to RSV. We hope to enhance our dynamic transmission models that accurately mimic RSV in temperate Perth through including information on the weather patterns in different areas of the state.

These models can then be used to predict what might happen to these viruses when a vaccination program is introduced.

Plain Language summary: Different viruses cause many chest infections in children. We are aiming to describe how weather factors (e.g. temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure) result in different patterns of these chest infections in children living in various geographical areas. We have been analysing large amounts of data from children born in Western Australia over a 13 year period as well as daily weather data from all the weather stations from around the state. We have been looking at how the weather patterns differ in different geographical regions that show different seasonal patterns of chest infections in children. We have also been developing computer models that replicate the seasonal patterns of one of the viruses that causes chest infections in Perth. Our next steps are to modify these models so they can replicate seasonal patterns of chest infections in areas other than Perth. The development of these models will help predict what the impact of new vaccines will have on chest infections and how some viruses influence each other.

Funder: Department of Health WA Merit Award

External collaborators: A/Prof Kathryn Glass and Ms Alexandra Hogan: National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT.