Congratulations to Dayle Keown, for winning a prize for the best summer scholarship report. Dayle’s project, conducted in Dr Joanna Kirman’s lab, was part of the multidisciplinary Whiti Te Ra study, which aims to understand the causes of early childhood respiratory infection in New Zealand. Dayle's project was to investigate whether the presence of rhinovirus correlated with respiratory disease severity. Unlike similar studies conducted on infants overseas, Dayle did not find that the presence of human rhinovirus in nasal swab samples was associated with disease severity. Interestingly, the number of human rhinovirus positive samples was twice as high as those detected in a similar study population in the US. The aim is to publish these findings, along with the investigations on other viruses present in the samples, later this year.
