We have found a small but statistically significant association between invasive pneumococcal disease and viral infections after accounting for the common seasonality of the infections. Influenza-attributable IPD accounted for between 0 and 9.2% of cases of IPD according

to age, meteorological variable and regression method used. In the additive negative binomial regression model, 7.5% of IPD is attributable to influenza, for all ages, when adjusted by average temperature (best-fitting model). The click here percentage of RSV-associated IPD accounted for between 1.5 and 25% of all IPD cases, with 3.5% of IPD attributable to RSV, for all ages, when adjusted by average temperature in the additive negative binomial regression model. Our results for influenza are in line with those of other studies applying similar techniques. They found influenza was associated with 6–10%11 and 5–6%17 of IPD cases. Our study is the first, to our knowledge, to estimate the IPD cases attributable to both influenza and RSV, in different age groups and including average temperature and hours of sunshine to allow for the seasonal characteristics of the data. Our study has looked in more detail at the influence of age in associations between IPD and viral infections.

We found that for influenza the attributable percentage of IPD cases is lowest in the 0–4 years group for both meteorological variables (∼0%) and highest in the over 65 years group when adjusted by temperature (3.2–4.8%, dependent on the model) or selleck highest in the 5–14 years group when adjusted by hours of sunshine (5.7–6.9%). For RSV, the attributable percentage of IPD cases was again lowest in the 0–4 years group for both meteorological variables (1–2%) and highest in the 15–64 years group for both variables (14.5–25%). In previous studies, evidence of associations between dipyridamole influenza and IPD has been more consistently reported in adults11, 13, 14 and 17 compared to children where the associations are weaker or non-existent.4, 5, 12, 15 and 16 We also found that the associations between IPD and influenza were stronger in older

age groups when adjusted by temperature. This was not the case when adjusted by hours of sunshine. However the data on hours of sunshine is only available at monthly time periods as opposed to weekly temperature measurements and the association between IPD and temperature was found to be stronger than that between IPD and sunshine (where all data was converted to monthly time periods). In the case of IPD and RSV in children, most studies4, 5 and 18 have found the association between IPD and RSV was stronger than that of IPD and influenza, with only Talbot et al.15 finding the reverse result. Our study also estimates that more cases of IPD in children are attributable to RSV than influenza; however the strength of the statistical evidence of our results for influenza is weak. We also found a similar result for adults.