Acute gastroenteritis is a common disease of adults and children worldwide.
Although it is not precisely defined, a general description is 1-5 days of watery diarrhea with prominent nausea and vomiting. The condition can be caused by a bewildering number of infections, drugs, toxins, and systemic diseases. Viruses are suspected when patient history and physical exams do not point to any other agent of injury and routine stool tests for usual bacterial pathogens are negative. The clinician encounters acute viral gastroenteritis in 3 settings. The first is sporadic gastroenteritis in infants, which most frequently is caused by rotavirus.