Virological and epidemiological study of Norwalk virus gastroenteritis.

诺沃克病毒(Norwalk Virus，NV)是引起食源性急性非细菌性胃肠炎暴发的最重要的病毒，尤其是在成人中。近年来新城疫病毒基因克隆的成功，催生了新病毒研究的新方法，如酶联免疫吸附试验、斑点杂交和逆转录聚合酶链式反应等。虽然新城疫病毒与人杯状病毒、猫杯状病毒和奥托福克病毒相关病毒之间的遗传关系尚不清楚，但斑点杂交法显示了新城疫病毒与部分丙型肝炎病毒或OARV毒株之间的亲缘关系。从10岁以下的急性胃肠炎患儿的粪便标本中检出的新城疫病毒很少。在日本，重组新城疫抗体的流行率在整个儿童期一直保持在较低水平，然后在学龄期和成年期早期急剧上升。在日本和东南亚健康成人的样本中观察到抗体的高流行率。这些结果表明，NV感染在日本和东南亚的成年人中很常见，但在日本的婴儿中可能很少见。用上述三种新方法对18起原因不明的急性胃肠炎暴发疫情进行了检测。其中3例为新城疫，其余15例为阴性。由于RT-PCR方法的敏感性和对扩增产物进行序列分析的有效性，因此RT-PCR方法是检测新城疫的最佳方法。

Norwalk virus (NV) is the most improtant causative virus of food-borne outbreaks of acute non-bacterial gastroenteritis especially in adults. The recent success of the NV gene cloning has resulted in the development of new methods like the ELISA,the dot blot hybridization and the RT-PCR for NV study.Although genetic relatedness between NV and human calicivirus (HCV), feline calicivirus and Otofuke-agent related virus (OARV) has not demonstrated by the ELISA,some relationships among NV and some strain of HCV or OARV was shown by the dot blot hybridization. Very few NV were detected in the stool specimens obtained from children, mainly younger than 10 years old, with acute gastroenteritis. The prevalence of antibody to recombinant NV remained at a low level throughout childhood and then showed a steep rise during school age and early adulthood in Japan. A high prevalence of antibody was observed in samples collected from healthy adults in Japan and Southeast Asia. These results suggested that NV infection is common in adults in Japan and Southeast Asia but may be rare in infants in Japan. 18 outbreaks of acute gastroenteritis with unknown causative pathogen were examined by the new three methods described above. Three of them were due to NV and the remaining 15 were negative by the ELISA.The RT-PCR method seem to be the best to detect NV because of the sensitivity and the availability of the sequence analysis of the PCR products.