Epidemiology of acute diarrhea in Childhood: an overview

Abstract

Much has been learned about the epidemiology of acute diarrheal disease since the folk conceptualization of a syndrome caused by "food indigestion." Despite early recognition of shigellosis, salmonellosis, giardiasis, and amebiasis as distinct clinical entities, there has been difficulty in the recent past in accepti ng that the remaining diarrheas were of an infectious nature. Furthermore, the appedance of diarrhea with the onset of weaning in many animal species and in man (18) and the systematic failure to find pathogenic agents in the majority of the diarrheas in the general population, contributed to questions of its infectious etiology.