Iraq: Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Outbreak Kills 18, Infects 90

Iraq’s Ministry of Health announced Saturday that the country was experiencing “a dangerous rise in viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF) cases,” with the ministry recording 90 infections and 18 deaths from the disease in recent days, India’s Zee News reported on Sunday.

“The number of infected people will continue to increase because we have already registered many suspected cases,” Iraq Health Ministry spokesman Saif Al-Badr told reporters on May 21.

Al-Badr noted that Iraq normally records about 20 viral hemorrhagic fever cases per year on average but has “already recorded four times that amount” so far as part of its latest epidemic of the disease, which began on May 10. Health officials detected the first case of Iraq’s ongoing viral hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Erbil, which is the capital of Iraq’s northern Kurdistan Region.

“The Erbil General Health Directorate announced Tuesday [May 10] that a 17-year-old butcher tested positive for the fever,” Iraq’s Kurdistan 24 news website reported at the time.

The teenager specifically contracted a disease known as “Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever,” which is typically transmitted via tick bite to livestock and then from livestock to humans. Cattle herders and butchers are at high risk of contracting the disease. Human-to-human transmission of viral hemorrhagic fever may occur “through direct contact with the blood of the infected person,” according to the World Health Organization.

Individuals infected with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever “present a variety of symptoms, ranging from asymptomatic or mild febrile illness to severe disease characterised by haemorrhagic manifestations, multiorgan failure and shock. The case fatality rate is approximately 30% among hospitalised patients,” according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) launched a public health awareness campaign in all of Iraq’s governorates — including in urban and rural communities — on May 16 in response to the nation’s latest epidemic of viral hemorrhagic fever. IRCS Health Department Director Dr. Ali Al-Moussawi detailed the effort in a press release at the time.

The statement read:

The health teams of the IRCS were spread in the areas where the virus hotspots appeared, such as the areas where livestock and sheep breeding and butcher shops abound, as the health teams have distributed the awareness folders and posters on how to prevent this disease and reduce its spread, adding to conduct direct meetings with the owners of butcher shops and meat, and warning them against indiscriminate slaughter in the streets and on sidewalks.

Al-Moussawi said he had additionally set up a “crisis cell” to determine “the ramifications of hemorrhagic fever spread after the increase in infections with this epidemic disease in many [Iraqi] governorates.”