Children with rotavirus diarrhoea presented with higher Vesikari scores [Mean (SD) = 11.7 (2.7)] than children hospitalized with non-rotaviral gastroenteritis [Mean (SD) Vesikari score = 10.8 (2.9), p < 0.001] ( Table 2). It was seen that 71% of children

hospitalized with rotavirus diarrhoea presented with severe disease selleck compound and 28% with moderate disease. In addition to Vesikari scores, severity assessment using the Clark score was carried for a subset of 156 children during the latter part of the surveillance. Seizure is a component of the Clark’s scoring system that is not evaluated in the Vesikari scoring key. Overall, moderate correlation was seen between scoring systems (Pearson’s correlation co-efficient, r = 0.652) with higher correlation for cases with rotavirus gastroenteritis (r = 0.768) than non-rotavirus gastroenteritis (r = 0.582) ( Fig. 1). Despite the correlation, there was great variability in the clinical description of severity by both methods. Using Clark’s scoring, 52.6% of children were categorized as presenting with mild disease while only 0.6% had severe illness. By contrast in this same sub population, the Vesikari scores defined only 1.3% of children as presenting with mild

disease ( Table 3). Since genotyping and severity data were available in this study, the effect of genotype on severity was explored. It was interesting to note that although the Vesikari scores were not significantly different across genotypes (p = 0.452), the severity score for common

genotypes G1P [8], G2P [4] and G9P [8] [Mean (SD) = 11.9 (2.3)] was higher than infection with multiple FK228 strains, unusual genotypes and untypable strains [Mean (SD) score = 11.2 (3.1), p = 0.031]. The charts of all 1001 children in the study were reviewed for collection of additional clinical below information. However, data on other clinical presentations apart from symptoms of gastroenteritis were available only for 470 children. There were no significant differences in rates of detection of extraintestinal manifestations such as upper and lower respiratory tract infections, urinary tract infections and seizures between children with and without rotavirus detected in stool (Table 4). One case of intussusception occurred in a child with non-rotavirus gastroenteritis. A two-month old child presenting with necrotizing enterocolitis stage I tested positive for rotavirus. Laboratory results showed significantly more hypernatremia in children with rotavirus gastroenteritis (5.1%) than non-rotaviral gastroenteritis (1.8%, p = 0.047). The epidemiology of rotavirus gastroenteritis has been extensively studied over the last several decades. Recent multi-country surveillance studies using standardized and comparable techniques have strengthened epidemiological data and provided region specific targets for vaccine development [15].