Clinical analysis of a dysentery outbreak in Taichung

In September 1993, we collected 207 patients due to dysentery, who visited the Department of Pediatrics at China Medical College Hospital. In our report, 67.6% of these patients were amebic dysentery, 19.3% were combined infection with amebic and Shigella sonnei dysentery, and 13.1% were Shigella sonnei dysentery. Therefore, amebic dysentery was the predominant cause during this outbreak. The clinical features of this outbreak were, in descending order, watery stool, fever, abdominal pain, mucinous stool and bloody stool. No concurrent liver abscess was discerned. Because there had not been such a clustering of dysentery in Taichung for so many years, we thought that travel to endemic areas might have been the underlying predisposing cause. Most of the school water supplying system was ground water, which might have been contaminated by a few patients returning from endemic areas. We thought that fecal-oral route by contaminated water might have been the primary transmission route.