Respiratory syncytial virus-associated hospitalizations in Louisiana.

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the most common cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia in children under one year of age worldwide. Records indicative of RSV cases were pulled from The Louisiana Inpatient Hospital Discharge Data based on RSV diagnosis codes to describe the burden of RSV infections in Louisiana from 1999 to 2010. Two thousand to three thousand hospitalized RSV cases occurred each year, with rates ranging from 37.2 to 71.4 hospitalizations per 100,000 population and the majority of cases (79%) being diagnosed with bronchiolitis. The vast majority of cases occurred in children under one year of age, and within that group, 44% of the cases occurred in children ages 0 to 3 months. The RSV season was found to occur from November to March, and immunoprophylaxis for high-risk infants should be given according to that season. Hospital-acquired versus community-acquired infections were also examined and most (96.1%) cases were community-acquired.