Are the symptoms of rotavirus obvious?

Rotavirus is actually a very common virus in our daily life. If it invades the human body, it is likely to cause diarrhea. Rotavirus is common in infants and mainly infects small intestinal cells, causing diarrhea in patients.

Rotavirus (RV) is a double-stranded RNA virus belonging to the Reoviridae family. It is the single leading cause of diarrhea in infants and young children, and nearly every child in the world by the age of about five years has been infected with rotavirus at least once. It mainly infects the epithelial cells of the small intestine, causing cell damage and causing diarrhea. Rotavirus is prevalent in summer, autumn and winter every year. The route of infection is fecal-oral. The clinical manifestations are acute gastroenteritis and osmotic diarrhea. The course of the disease is generally 7 days, with fever lasting 3 days, vomiting for 2 to 3 days, diarrhea for 5 days, and severe dehydration symptoms. In addition to its impact on human health, rotavirus can also infect animals and is a pathogen of livestock.

Symptoms

Rotavirus gastroenteritis is a mild to severe illness with symptoms such as vomiting, watery diarrhea, and a low-grade fever. When children are infected with this type of virus, there is an incubation period of about two days before symptoms develop. Symptoms usually begin with vomiting, followed by four to eight days of heavy diarrhea. Rotavirus infection causes dehydration more often than bacterial pathogens that are more likely to cause dehydration, and therefore dehydration has become the most common cause of death in rotavirus infection.

During a person's lifetime, infection with rotavirus A follows this course: the first infection usually causes symptoms, but subsequent infections are typically asymptomatic because the immune system provides partial protection. Therefore, the incidence of infection symptoms is highest in children under two years old, and then gradually decreases until the age of 45. Although neonatal infection is common, it is usually mild or asymptomatic; the most severe symptoms occur in older children aged six months to two years and in children with immunodeficiency. Most adults are not susceptible to rotavirus because of immunity acquired during childhood; gastroenteritis in adults is usually due to other causes rather than rotavirus, but asymptomatic infection in adults can still be contagious in the community. Symptomatic reinfection usually results from infection with a different rotavirus A serotype.