Influenza C virus is a significant cause of upper-respiratory-tract illness in children < 6 years old, and the risk of complications with lower-respiratory-tract illness is particularly high in children < 2 years old.

Human rotavirus was detected by electron microscopy in 11 of 30 infants and young children with intussusception (37% of subjects under study). Serologic complement fixation tests revealed evidence of infection with the rotavirus in 70% of the patients examined who eliminated the rotavirus in their stools. These results indicate that human rotavirus, in addition to adenovirus, may be an infectious agent causing intussusception in infants and young children.

A climatologic analysis of human rotavirus infection in inpatients with acute diarrhea was conducted over a seven-year period. The infection frequency appeared to be related to temperature, but not to relative humidity. Human rotavirus infection was found to appear abruptly when the mean temperature of any 10-day period became less than 5 C (November or December), reached a peak when it was less than 0 C (January and February), and waned when it became greater than 20 C (June and July) in the city of Yamagata in northern Japan.

After immunizing 8-month pregnant Holstein cows with human rotavirus, Wa strain, cow colostrum containing neutralizing antibody to human rotavirus, designated as Rota colostrum, was obtained. After randomly grouping 13 infants from a single orphanage, 6 infants received 20 ml of Rota colostrum every morning and 7 control infants received 20 ml of market milk. One month later, rotavirus associated diarrhea was observed in 6 of the 7 infants given milk and 1 out of the 6 infants given Rota colostrum. Orally administered Rota colostrum significantly protected infants from diarrhea caused by rotavirus (P less than 0.05). Two out of 5 Rota colostrum recipients who were free from diarrhea showed rises in complement fixation (CF) antibody titer after the rotavirus infection epidemic. Thus, Rota colostrum prevented the outbreak of diarrhea but did not prevent immunological responses to natural rotavirus infection. In the therapeutic trial Rota colostrum had no effect on duration of diarrhea, bowel movements or virus shedding in stool. However, there were no side-effects of Rota colostrum.