Frequent respiratory pathogens of respiratory tract infections in children attending daycare centers.

Objectives: To identify and characterize respiratory viruses that infect children from daycare centers with symptoms of respiratory infection and to evaluate the association of clinical and epidemiological disease data with the identified virus.

Methods: We conducted a study between 2003 and 2005 in 176 children with respiratory infection symptoms attending a municipal daycare center. Samples from nasopharyngeal secretion were tested by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction and positive samples for picornavirus were sequenced.