چکیده (انگلیسی):

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) causes respiratory illness in young children and is most commonlyassociated with bronchiolitis. RSV typically occurs as annual or biennial winter epidemics in temperateregions, with less pronounced seasonality in the tropics. We sought to characterise and compare theseasonality of RSV and bronchiolitis in temperate and tropical Western Australia. We examined over 13years of RSV laboratory identifications and bronchiolitis hospitalisations in children, using an extensivelinked dataset from Western Australia. We applied mathematical time series analyses to identify thedominant seasonal cycle, and changes in epidemic size and timing over this period. Both the RSV andbronchiolitis data showed clear winter epidemic peaks in July or August in the southern Western Australiaregions, but less identifiable seasonality in the northern regions. Use of complex demodulation provedvery effective at comparing disease epidemics. The timing of RSV and bronchiolitis epidemics coincidedwell, but the size of the epidemics differed, with more consistent peak sizes for bronchiolitis than forRSV. Our results show that bronchiolitis hospitalisations are a reasonable proxy for the timing of RSVdetections, but may not fully capture the magnitude of RSV epidemics.© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).