The natural history of acute upper respiratory tract infections in children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: To describe the natural history of acute upper respiratory tract infections (AURIs) in primary-school children, by recording their daily symptoms. BACKGROUND: AURIs in children are one of the most common reasons for people seeking advice from general practitioners (GPs); however, little is known about the natural history of AURIs in terms of the length and severity of symptoms, because the majority of illnesses are contracted at home. METHOD: After an initial pilot study to test the feasibility of parents recording symptoms in a diary based on the Canadian Acute Respiratory Illness and Flu Scale (CARIFS), a random selection of primary schools operating in the region was carried out in order to minimise selection bias. Meetings were arranged at the 20 schools to obtain written consent from parents and to give out diaries with a stamped addressed envelope. The diaries recorded daily symptom severity for one episode of AURI, and the data were analysed using SPSS programmes. FINDINGS: Diaries were returned from 223 children, of whom 146 had had an AURI. The average age was eight years, and there were almost equal numbers of boys and girls. The most frequent symptoms were runny nose, cough, feeling unwell and sore throat. There was a biphasic distribution with systemic symptoms in the first three days characterised by fever, poor sleep, irritability, not playing and headache. By day four, symptoms localising the infection to the upper respiratory tract appeared with runny nose, cough, sore throat and poor appetite; these continued into the second and occasionally third week. Most symptoms lasted for 5-11 days, with a median length for all symptoms of seven days. Symptoms defined by parents tended to be scored less for severity than symptoms defined by children.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".