In children with apparent viral gastroenteritis (vomiting and diarrhea), clinicians sometimes order or perform a rapid detection test of the stool for rotavirus. No specific antiviral therapy for rotavirus is available, but rotavirus is the most common cause of hospital-acquired diarrhea in children and is an important cause of acute gastroenteritis in children attending childcare. A rotavirus vaccine is recommended by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Why would we want to know if a child’s gastroenteritis is caused by rotavirus?
A diagnosis of rotavirus would not often affect treatment decisions, as treatment will generally just be hydration. It might prevent additional testing to determine the cause of the diarrhea, although when clinicians send a stool sample to try to identify an organism, it is typically for all tests at once. It might affect decisions about isolation, except that we should assume that all childhood diarrhea is quite contagious. The main use would be in tracking an epidemic, e.g., of diarrhea on an inpatient ward, or for estimating the impact of a vaccine. Sporadic testing by individual clinicians is unlikely to be very helpful for the latter purpose.
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