Studies of infantile diarrhea in Karachi, Pakistan. II. Multiple virus isolations from rectal swabs.

Recently Ramos-Alvarez and Olarte in Mexico City (1) reported that 58 per cent of a series of 246 infants with diarrhea were positive for either enteroviruses or adenoviruses, in contrast to only 12 per cent of 158 control children without diarrhea. In a four-year study, Yow, Melnick and co-workers in Houston (2, 3) recovered viruses from 13 per cent of 560 diarrheal infants, but also found that 11 per cent of 568 controls without diarrhea were virus-positive. A recent review (4) of studies from North America and Western Europe could report no significant differences in viral excretion rates between diarrheal infants and control subjects. Consideration of these results suggested that the etiology of infantile diarrhea may have a marked geographic or socioeconomic variation, and that virus studies performed in areas of high incidence of infantile diarrhea might reveal an