Protracted nasopharyngeal colonization with one and the same NTHI strain has also been found in CVID patients.
Colonization is suspected to cause deeper infections, e.g. sinusitis and pneumonia.
We also wished to evaluate the impact of s.c. To characterize different strains of NTHI, we used an arbitrarilly primed polymerase chain reaction and pulsed field gel electrophoresis. In nasopharyngeal secretions, the level of specific antibody activity to S. pneumoniae was on the same level in healthy as in RAOM infants. It was significantly lower than in adults, indicating that local immunity in nasopharynx is not fully developed at 1-3 years of age. This suggests that RAOM infants have a local defect in cytokine production.