الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Diarrhea is a common cause of morbidity and mortality all over the world. Conservative estimates put diarrhea in the top 5 causes of death worldwide, most occurring in young children in developing countriesThis cross-sectional (descriptive) study was conducted on 100 randomly selected children, 56males and 44 females, aged ≤ 6 month -6 years, suffering from diarrhea. 60 of them came from rural areas and the remaining 40 were living in urban localities. The children were collected from Benha University Hospitals in Egypt, from December 2013 to June 2014The cases were subjected to detailed history taking , clinical examination and laboratory investigations including stool analysis ,stool culture as well as astrovirus antigen detection in stool by ELISA technique.In this study The incidence rate of astrovirus infection was 8 %.The current study revealed that 3 out of 4 positive cases (75%) were in the age goup 6 to 24 months and 1 case (25%) was in the age group 2- 6 years.
There is no association between Astrovirus infection and gender.
Watery diarrhea (100%) and vomiting (100%) were the main symptoms reported in this study . fever (25%) and abdominal pain (25%) were also reported but there was no significant association between them and astrovirus infection . Astrovirus is usually mild and self limiting disease but may need hospitalization in some cases.
In this study the 4 Astrovirus positive cases (100%) were occurred in winter.
There was high incidence of astrovirus infection detected in artificially fed infant (21.4%) compared to brest fed ones (5.9%).There was an increase in the infection rate among low socioeconomic classes 3 cases from rural area (8.8%) and 1 case from urban (6.3%) where over crowding and lake of hygiene is present as human astroviruses are transmitted by feco-oral route including contaminated food and water.Although the rate of detection of astrovirus infection reported in this study may be undermined by the limited number of total analyzed samples, still it illustrates the medical importance of astrovirus as a cause of gastroenteritis among egyptian infants and children and it is expected that this virus will play an increasing role after the introduction of rotavirus vaccine in Egypt.