Rhinovirus May Protect Against Influenza Infection, and Vice-Versa

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Patients with either influenza or rhinovirus are less likely to become infected with the other virus, according to a recent study.

It has previously been observed that rhinovirus is less common during influenza season and vice versa. In their new study, researchers used samples from 44,230 cases of acute respiratory illness from 36,157 patients. The samples were tested for 11 different respiratory viruses over a 9-year period.

When traditional analytical methods were unable to account for various limitations simultaneously, the researchers developed their own method to examine the interactions between virus pairs.

“This bespoke approach revealed many fewer statistically supported epidemiological interactions [than previous statistical approaches], with negative interactions between influenza A virus and rhinovirus and between influenza B virus and adenovirus, as well as positive interactions between respiratory syncytial virus and human metapneumovirus and between parainfluenza 1 and parainfluenza 2,” the researchers wrote.

Overall, these interactions demonstrated that the short-term protective effects that certain viruses have against one another could be linked to the asynchronous seasonal patterns that have been observed for influenza A virus and rhinovirus. However, they noted that while some of the interactions were present at the population level, they were not found at the host level, suggesting that these may be due to independent factors not captured in their analysis.

“Our study provides strong statistical support for the existence of interactions among genetically broad groups of respiratory viruses at both population and individual host scales," the researchers concluded. "Our findings imply that the incidence of influenza infections is interlinked with the incidence of noninfluenza viral infections with implications for the improved design of disease forecasting models and the evaluation of disease control interventions. Future experimental studies are required to decipher the biological mechanisms that underpin virus–virus interactions and their effects on the within-host dynamics of infection.”

—Michael Potts

Reference:

Nickbakhsh S, Mair C, Matthews L, et al. Virus–virus interactions impact the population dynamics of influenza and the common cold [published online December 16, 2019]. PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1911083116.