Is prolonged rotavirus infection a common cause of protracted diarrhoea?

Before Ruth Bishop’s identification in Melbourne of human rotavirus in 1973, paediatricians could offer only platitudes by way of explanation when confronted with young children with acute diarrhoea. Since then it has become clear that rotavirus is the most common cause of gastroenteritis in children under 2 years of age living in either developed or developing countries.1 Its pathogenic mechanisms have been largely elucidated, mainly by studying an analogous infection in piglets caused by transmissible gastroenteritis agent.2 3 Rotavirus probably causes diarrhoea by increasing the turnover of enterocytes along the villus axis, leading to the population of blunted villi by immature cells that are incapable of normal absorption, and are more crypt-like and secretory in nature.4-6 Rotavirus can also reduce sucrase–isomaltase expression in human enterocytes …