Following the 1997 outbreak of EV71 associated HFMD in Sarawak, Malaysia, the Health Department installed a sentinel surveillance programme with the expectation that we would be able to study epidemiological trends and begin to predict when to expect outbreaks with sufficient accuracy in order to implement public health interventions to reduce the burden of the disease. Although the surveillance programme is still ongoing in Sarawak, we have sought to glean some preliminary information from the data generated over the first 7 years of the programme. two HEV71 outbreaks. A recent report on a similar surveillance programme in Yamagata Prefecture in Japan (1998) (1999) (2000) (2001) (2002) (2003) suggests that in Yamagata there is frequent importation of HEV71 from surrounding countries seeding the clusters of cases seen annually in this community [10] . The HEV71 strains in this study were isolated from small clusters of cases that tended to be seen in the summer months while in our situation we observed outbreaks of HEV71 every 3 years with cases being seen much earlier in the year, well before the northern summer. In 2003 both Sarawak and Yamagata experienced a large outbreak and in both situations, a genogroup shift from C to B was noted.