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David O. Matson, On a Multinational Assessment of Rotavirus Disease in Europe, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Volume 195, Issue Supplement_1, May 2007, Pages S1–S3, https://doi.org/10.1086/516841
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Extract
Rotaviruses were discovered in the 1960s in animals and in the 1970s in humans; the latter discovery was made by an intrepid group who performed duodenal biopsies on children with acute gastroenteritis (AGE) [1]. By the late 1970s, data already clearly indicated that rotavirus was the cause of the annual winter peak of AGE affecting young children, as well as a frequent cause of severe gastroenteritis in various animal species (e.g., [2–5]). Use of the retrospectroscope clarified or left as tantalizing the suggestion that rotaviruses were the cause of the annual “winter vomiting syndrome” first described in children in 1910 in Japan [6] and in 1929 in the United States [7]. The recognition of that winter peak was a result of improved water and sewage handling that markedly reduced exposure to bacterial and parasitic pathogens but not to the common viral pathogens.
Many studies have been conducted to examine the burden of rotavirus disease. Most of these have been cross-sectional in design, have documented the high (usually 30%–60%) frequency of rotavirus detection among children hospitalized with AGE, and have found that the more intense the severity of illness, the more frequently rotavirus is detected. Longitudinal, cohort studies of rotavirus disease have been fewer in number, and most of these have suffered from study design issues, such as enrollment of subjects at an age later than birth, resulting in infections at an early age being missed, or assessment of rotavirus infection only by detection of virus excreted in stool, when a large fraction of rotavirus infections are detected not by routinely applied assays but by seroresponse. Population-based studies have been even less frequently undertaken, and most such studies have depended on indirect measures of rotavirus disease—namely, the assignment of International Classification of Diseases codes, along with occurrence of the codes within age, season, and list position (within a list of assigned International Classification of Diseases codes) distributions [8].
