Short report
Quantification of human bocavirus in lower respiratory tract infections in China
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* Corresponding author: Jianming Qiu jqiu@kumc.edu
1 Wenling First Hospital, Wenling, Zhejiang Province, China
2 Hangzhou Zhiyuan Institute of Medical Diagnostics, Hangzhou, China
3 Beijing Institute of Radiation Medicine, Beijing, China
4 Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO, USA
5 Department of Microbiology, Molecular Genetics and Immunology, University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, KS, USA
Infectious Agents and Cancer 2007, 2:3 doi:10.1186/1750-9378-2-3
Published: 31 January 2007Abstract
A quantitative PCR method was established to quantify human bocavirus (HBoV) genomic copies in clinical specimens from children with lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI) in China. A total of 257 respiratory tract specimens were tested, and 7 (2.7%) of these (all sputum samples) were positive, with genomic copies that ranged from 8.0 × 103 to 8.0 × 109 in the samples. The main clinical symptom of patients who were positive for HBoV DNA was a pneumonia-like syndrome represented by high fever and cough. Our results suggest that HBoV may be an important etiological agent of LRTI in children in China.