The First Outbreak of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Disease in Northwest of Iran

Purpose

Crimean–Congo Hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is a viral hemorrhagic fever which is transmitted by tick bites, or through contact with infected animal tissues or secretions during and immediately post slaughter. It can be responsible for severe outbreaks in humans.

Methods

We have explained 10 patients of CCHF, which was acquired during the first outbreak in northwest of Iran. All 10 patients were admitted to our hospital and all were treated promptly by ribavirin.

Results

In this outbreak, 51 blood samples were collected from suspected patients and sent to Pasteur Institute of Iran for additional assessments. CCHF was confirmed by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) in 19.60% of patients.

Conclusion

High movement of livestock and vectors in spring and summer seasons is one of the major causes of virus circulation in northwestern Iran.

Assessing Resilience of Urban Critical Infrastructure Networks: A Case Study of Ahvaz, Iran

Cities around the world increasingly recognize the need to build on their resilience to deal with the converging forces of urbanization and climate change. Given the significance of critical infrastructure for maintaining quality of life in cities, improving their resilience is of high importance to planners and policy makers. The main purpose of this study is to spatially analyze the resilience of water, electricity, and gas critical infrastructure networks in Ahvaz, a major Iranian city that has been hit by various disastrous events over the past few years. Towards this goal, we first conducted a two-round Delphi survey to identify criteria that can be used for determining resilience of critical infrastructure networks across different parts of the city. The selected criteria that were used for spatial analysis are related to the physical texture, the design pattern, and the scale of service provision of the critical infrastructure networks. Results showed that, overall, critical infrastructure networks in Ahvaz do not perform well against the measurement criteria. This is specially the case in Regions 1, 2, 4, and 6, which are characterized by issues such as old and centralized infrastructure networks and high levels of population density. The study highlights the need to make improvements in terms of the robustness, redundancy, and flexibility of the critical infrastructure networks in the city.

New aspects about Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) cases and associated fatality trends: A global systematic review and meta-analysis

Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) is the most popular tick-borne disease causing by Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV). There are several valuable reviews considering some fields of the CCHF aspects. While there is no a systematic review about means and trends of CCHF cases and fatality rate, means and trends of CCHF cases and fatality rates of human occupations involved in CCHF. Therefore, this meta-analysis review performed to highlight and provide a global detailed of the above CCHF aspects. Among 398 collected papers, 173 papers were become this meta-analysis review. The study results confirm that an apparent increasing CCHF cases occurred through the past decades. The trends of annually and periodically CCHF cases and fatality rates were also increased. The means of annually and periodically CCHF cases and fatality rates were 57 and 432 cases, and 10 cases and 32.2 % and 49 cases and 28.8 %, respectively. The means of annually and periodically CCHF fatality rates are about one-tenth of CCHF human cases. The mean of CCHF fatality rates in Africa (22.0 %) is lower than Asia (33.5 %) and Europe (33.8 %). Among occupations involved in CCHF, agricultural (28.9 %), health-care (19.2 %) and slaughterhouse (16.7 %) workers, and farmers (13.9 %) had the maximum CCHF fatality rates in order. Based on literature review of CCHFV S-segment aspects, several clades and genotypes are reported to distribute in Africa, Asia and Europe regions. There are very wide fields to investigate the epidemiology characteristics of CCHFV clades, genotypes and their distribution in the future.