Researchers who analyzed US hospitalization data and found a connection between RSV and the risk of pneumonia caused by S. pneumoniae.
Associations cannot prove that one infection causes increased susceptibility to the other, and because the researches only had overall numbers for hospitalizations linked to either pathogen, they also could not check whether children had actually been infected with both RSV and S. pneumoniae. Nonetheless, the results point to possible interaction between the two diseases, and suggest that RSV infection may increase the risk for pneumococcal pneumonia, particularly in young infants.
