Molecular and epidemiological investigations of cryptosporidiosis in Cuban children.

Molecular and epidemiological studies of Cryptosporidium infections amongst 28 Cuban children (aged 2-8 years) with diarrhoea are described. As few of the younger infected children but most of the older infected children had been breastfed, short-term protection from maternal antibodies passed to infants during breastfeeding may result in a lack of cryptosporidial infection in infancy. This protection of breastfeeding children may, however, result in such children developing less anti-Cryptosporidium immunity of their own (than their bottle-fed counterparts), so that, by school age, the children who had been breastfed are those most likely to be found infected. In the present study, in contrast with the observations made during a previous study of cryptosporidiosis in Cuban children, vomiting was rare (7%) whereas abdominal pain was common (57%). These differences in expression of symptoms between studies may be age-related. As seen in other studies from similar countries, including those of the Caribbean and Latin America, C. hominis was found to predominate, the results of the successful molecular analyses revealing 10 C. hominis infections but no C. parvum. Subgenotyping (at the gp60 locus) indicated that the C. hominis infections included a wide range of subtypes, with isolates from three subtype families (Ia, Ib and Id) being detected.