SPRED_School: Surveillance of respiratory viruses among children attending a primary school in rural coastal Kenya

This study is part of a larger project titled SPReD (Studies of the Pathways of transmission of Respiratory virus Disease; http://virec-group.org/research/) which aims to advance understanding of the nature of the spread of respiratory viruses. The study was conducted as one-year surveillance of respiratory viruses in a rural primary school in Kilifi county, coastal Kenya with the main aim of characterizing respiratory virus infection in the school setting and defining the role of school-going children in the transmission of these viruses in the general community. The main dataset contains 80 variables and 3441 observations. These data include records of anthropometric measures, acute respiratory infection (ARI) symptoms, and laboratory test results from nasal samples obtained from symptomatic school children every week over one school year. Each student's anthropometric measures, including age, grade, weight, height, mid-upper arm circumference, temperature, and respiratory rate, were recorded every week from a random sample of symptomatic students in each grade. Acute respiratory infection symptoms were also recorded at this time. Nasal samples were screened for 15 virus targets using real-time PCR. Samples were considered positive for a specific target if the ct value was <35. The dataset is used to describe the types of respiratory viruses circulating among school-going children.