Table 3 Examples of common comments from pediatricians regarding rotavirus disease.

"We have lots of experience with rotavirus disease. I think vomiting and diarrhea ranks up there with my least favorite illness, because it's a lot of supportive care, a lot of phone calls, a lot of coming back to the office, a lot of reevaluation, and there's nothing you can do other than fluids."

"Most kids did okay on oral rehydration, but we had a lot who were hospitalized for IV therapy."

"I went through residency in the late '80 s, and we used to have an entire ward that would be filled with kids with really horrible diarrhea. Entire wards that would fill up the hospital, to the point that people would say, 'You don't want to be on [the infant floor] during rotaviral season.' Because ...you would get 25, 30 admissions a night and most of them would be having diarrhea and a lot of them would be almost in shock because of it. You could see how in a place where there weren't resources for IV fluids that there would be a lot of deaths from dehydration."

"I remember how contagious it is, and how it lives on surfaces and we'd have to gown, glove, mask, and practically use dedicated equipment for the rooms in hospital. And if you suspected it in the outpatient setting, you had to be extremely careful by cleaning the room down. It just spread within families, but the babies would be the sickest."

"Over the years, we've had some significantly ill kids from [rotavirus]. One kid had a shock-like response to rotavirus and it totally devastated him, so that he's probably one of the sickest little developmentally devastated kids in the practice and it was from rotavirus years ago."