Until recently, the genus Rhinovirus has been frequently neglected from clinical laboratory diagnosis and to date its members are not sought independently. Improved diagnostic methods, the broader application of existing PCR technology, new sequence data and many new insights have greatly enhanced our understanding of human rhinoviruses and the selective pressures impacting on their evolution [25, 26] . Similarly, the identification of a putative new HRV species, HRV C, the characterisation of HRV-QPM's molecular features and epidemiology and the identification of similar viruses around the world [31, 34, 52] have potential to reinvigorate HRV research. We found that the variants of one strain of the HRV Cs, HRV-QPM, sought in a well characterised population of specimens collected over all months of a single year, were more often associated with LRT illness than is commonly reported. The illness frequently presented as exacerbation of expiratory wheezing or persistent cough, with a requirement for supplemental oxygen, steroids and bronchodilator treatments. Despite exhaustive PCR-based investigation for other respiratory viral causes in our previous retrospective studies [31, 41] , HRV-QPM detection, in the absence of any other pathogen, occurred among infants with mild, moderate and severe (in both instances) LRT illness and most cases (88.2%) were admitted to hospital. Associated illness was usually (92.3% of the time) scored as mild to moderate and 58.8% of the HRV-QPM positive cases were children aged 12 months or less. The same age group represented 43.2% of the total study population originally screened for HRV-QPM (n = 1,244). While it is to be expected that a paediatric hospital-based population would overestimate the severity of HRV C clinical impact compared to a communitybased study, our study may in fact better represent the impact of first infection with HRV strains, the major pathogens detected during the first year of life [53] .