Acute Diarrhea — A Toxin Disease?

Abstract

Dysentery of this Arabian coast sort used to fall like a hammer blow and crush its victims for a few hours, after which the extreme effects passed off; but it left men curiously tired.T. E. LawrenceAcute diarrhea has confounded several generations of clinicians and microbiologists. What could be more frustrating than the inability to identify pathogens in 80 per cent of acute gastroenteritis cases — a disease that afflicts approximately 200,000,000 children and adults on any given day of the year? Cryptic appellations such as "nonspecific gastroenteritis," "acute undifferentiated diarrhea" and "summer diarrhea" have been assigned to this . . .