NEW DELHI: A study on the causes of severe diarrhoea in young children, conducted at seven sites in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asian countries including India, has found that rotavirus is responsible for most such cases.

The Global Enteric Multicenter Study (GEMS), published in the latest issue of Lancet, shows diarrhoeal disease, which is responsible for one in every ten child deaths during the first five years of life worldwide, has the highest rate of incidence in India compared to other sites.

The other sites included Bangladesh and Pakistan in Asia and Kenya, Mali, Mozambique and Gambia in Africa. Each site provided a censused population, using a demographic surveillance system (DSS) in which field workers visited each household to record births, deaths and migrations two to four times every year, supplemented by weekly updates of births and deaths in children 0-59 months.

Dr Dipika Sur, principal investigator, National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, Kolkata, which was one of the study centres, said among infants, the burden of diarrhoeal deaths in India was twice that of the next highest site. Suri said rotavirus alone caused one episode of moderate-to-severe diarrhea (MSD) for every four infants each year.

The publication of the research data on diarrhoeal diseases comes a day before the Department of Biotechnology announces the results of phase three efficacy studies in India for a low-cost, locally made rotavirus vaccine that is likely to be launched in the first quarter of 2014.

“GEMS data reveals important information that can inform evidence-based diarrhoeal disease prevention and control strategies in our country. Rapidly expanding accesses to existing tools, such as oral rehydration salts against the top disease-causing pathogens is essential. In particular, access to rotavirus vaccines is critical to controlling the burden of moderate-to-severe diarrhea (MSD) in India, given the exceptionally high incidence of rotavirus-induced MSD across all age groups,” said another research scientist.

The World Health Organization estimates that between 90,000 and 153,000 children die from rotavirus infection in India each year. According to the WHO , more than 2.3 million children below five years of age die in India annually. Of these, about 334,000 die from diarrhoea-related diseases.