Sapovirus accounts for 1 to 17% of global diarrhea cases, with a notably high incidence in children under two years, being the second highest among diarrheal pathogens.
Sapovirus is a significant and increasingly recognized cause of childhood diarrhea globally, though research and vaccine development are hindered by the lack of cell culture systems and animal models.
Sapovirus, a genus in the Caliciviridae family alongside noro virus, is increasingly identified as an important cause of childhood diarrhea. Some challenges exist in our ability to better understand sapo virus infections, along with the inability to develop sapo virus in cell culture, which has hindered diagnosis and studies of immunity. Another problem is that people along with sapo virus illness are frequently co-infected together with other enteric infections, complicating our capacity to attribute diarrhea episodes to a single pathogen. Recent findings: We can now estimate the prevalence of the disease more accurately thanks to the development of molecular technologies for sapo virus determination. Between 1 to 17% of diarrhoea bouts globally are caused by the sapo virus, with young children and older people bearing the greatest burden. Further, epidemiological studies have used novel approaches to account for the presence of co-infections along with other enteric pathogens; one multi-site cohort study of children under two years of age observed that sapo virus exhibited the second highest attributable incidence among all diarrheal pathogens studied.
Murthy et al. (2026) studied this question. Sapovirus accounts for 1 to 17% of global diarrhea cases, with a notably high incidence in children under two years, being the second highest among diarrheal pathogens.