Coronaviruses in Children, Greece

摘要

To the Editor: Two recently de-tected human coronaviruses (HCoVs), NL63 and HKU1, increased the num-ber of coronaviruses known to infect humans to 5 (1–3). HCoV-229E and HCoV-NL63 belong to antigenic group 1, HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1 belong to antigenic group 2, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)–associated coronavirus (SARS-CoV) is most closely related to group 2 coronaviruses. In 2005, an optimized pancoronavirus reverse transcription–PCR assay was used to explore the incidence of HCoV-NL63 infection in children in Belgium who had a diagnosis of respiratory tract in-fection (4).We report the results of an epidemiologic study that used a uni-versal coronavirus RT-PCR assay to detect coronaviruses among children in Greece with acute respiratory tract infections