Abstract

Background: Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe diarrhoeal disease in infants and young children all over the world. About 40% of more than 125 million cases of diarrhoea each year in the world are attributed to rotavirus. According to reports of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States, each year, rotavirus causes approximately 111 million infections, 25 million hospitalizations, and 440,000 deaths in children less than five years of age, worldwide, and the total associated medical costs due to rotavirus infection are estimated to be enormous. In Nigeria, about three hundred children under the age of five are thought to be lost annually to diarrhoea. Methods: Data including stool samples and background information were collected from 157 diarrhoeic children aged less than five years; from eight different hospitals in the southern part of Nigeria between June, 2006 and July 2009. Viral RNA was extracted from the stool samples with the RNA mini-kit (Qiagen) and a fragment of the VP7 gene was amplified with the Reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), from the extracted RNA. Results: Of the 157 specimens collected from these hospitals, Rotavirus was amplified from 29 (18.5%) of them. There was no significant sex preponderance observed (p<0.05). However the peak incidence of Rotavirus diarrhoea was seen among children between 12 and 24 months. Conclusion: Rotavirus gastroenteritis remains a serious public health problem in the developing world and given the extraordinary diversity of the virus in some countries, adequate surveillance is needed to establish rotavirus disease burden. Moreover, as various multinational health organizations take on projects for producing and circulating the rotavirus vaccine, to reduce rotavirus infection in developing countries and to curtail medical costs in developed countries, the precise situation in developing countries like Nigeria needs to be adequately projected so as to effectively enforce the use of the Rotavirus vaccine.