Enterovirus D68-Associated Acute Respiratory Illness - New Vaccine Surveillance Network, United States, July-October, 2017 and 2018.

In the fall of 2014, an outbreak of enterovirus D68 (EV-D68)-associated acute respiratory illness (ARI) occurred in the United States (1,2); before 2014, EV-D68 was rarely reported to CDC (2,3). In the United States, reported EV-D68 detections typically peak during late summer and early fall (3). EV-D68 epidemiology is not fully understood because testing in clinical settings seldom has been available and detections are not notifiable to CDC. To better understand EV-D68 epidemiology, CDC recently established active, prospective EV-D68 surveillance among pediatric patients at seven U.S. medical centers through the New Vaccine Surveillance Network (NVSN) (4). This report details a preliminary characterization of EV-D68 testing and detections among emergency department (ED) and hospitalized patients with ARI at all NVSN sites during July 1-October 31, 2017, and the same period in 2018. Among patients with ARI who were tested, EV-D68 was detected in two patients (0.8%) in 2017 and 358 (13.9%) in 2018. Continued active, prospective surveillance of EV-D68-associated ARI is needed to better understand EV-D68 epidemiology in the United States.
Competing Interests: All authors have completed and submitted the ICMJE form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. W. Allan Nix reports a CDC employee invention report filing with CDC’s Technology Transfer Office for the pan EV-D68 real time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction assay and U.S. Patent Numbers 7247457, 7714122, and 8048630. W. Allan Nix and M. Steven Oberste report issuance of U.S. patent number 9,938,588 (Compositions and methods for detecting enterovirus D68). John Williams reports personal fees from Quidel and from GlaxoSmithKline, outside the submitted work. No other potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.