Kids' Diarrhea Virus Makes Its Way Into Blood

Children can harbor rotavirus without gastro complaints, experts say.

By Kathleen Doheny
HealthDay Reporter
Thursday, April 19, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

THURSDAY, April 19 (HealthDay News) -- Rotavirus, the most common cause of severe diarrhea in children, can cause a systemic infection, not just infection confined to the intestines, a new study confirms.

The finding suggests that children may carry and pass on the bug even if they don't have diahhrea.

That's something experts have suspected for a while. "Until about three years ago, we thought the virus only infected cells in the small intestine," noted lead researcher Margaret Conner, an associate professor of molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "We thought the virus was restricted to the gastrointestinal tract."

In 2003, however, Conner's lab and others reported that rotavirus really appeared to be more of a systemic infection.

Now, Conner and her colleagues from other universities and medical centers have tested samples of blood from children hospitalized with gastroenteritis and compared them with samples from children admitted with noninfectious conditions and from healthy adults.

In all, the researchers tested blood samples obtained from children with gastroenteritis, including 57 youngsters with stools that were rotavirus-positive and 41 with rotavirus-negative stools, 58 children with bronchiolitis (a respiratory tract infection) of known viral origin, 17 with bronchiolitis of unknown viral origins, and 17 children with non-infectious conditions. They also tested 28 healthy adults.

"We looked for an antigen, a marker of whether the infectious virus is there," Conner said. The antigen is actually a protein fragment from the surface of the virus.

They found the antigen was in the blood of 51 of the 57 children with rotavirus-positive stools, in 8 of 9 in children without diarrhea but with rotavirus-positive stool, in 2 of 17 kids with bronchiolitis of unknown viral cause without gastroenteritis and in 5 of 41 children with gastroenteritis but with negative stools. The antigen was not found in the blood samples of any other group.