Influenza virus but not MERS coronavirus circulation in Iran, 2013–2016: Comparison between pilgrims and general population

Abstract

This study showed the prevalence of influenza infections among Iranian pilgrims and general population and suggests continuing surveillance, infection control and appropriate vaccination especially nowadays that the risk of influenza pandemic threatens the world, meanwhile accurate screening for MERS-CoV is also recommended.

A systematic review of emerging respiratory viruses at the Hajj and possible coinfection with Streptococcus pneumoniae

“…The majority of viral respiratory infections acquired during pilgrimage are due to influenza viruses, and rhinoviruses [64]. The diagnosis of seasonal influenza during the hajj was a major focus of most studies addressing the prevalence of respiratory viruses among pilgrims [23,25,[32][33][34]36,39,40,43,56,[68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80]. In these studies, different methods were used to detect respiratory viruses, with PCR being the most common used method.…”

“…The included studies were classified based on the methods used to detect respiratory viruses. Methods include polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [15,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] (Table 1), cell culture [26,27,[43][44][45] (Table 2), direct immunofluorescence staining [46], and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) [47][48][49] (Table 3).…”

“…We included studies addressing the prevalence of viral respiratory infections. Many of these studies reported the prevalence of clinical respiratory tract infections among pilgrims, including upper respiratory tract infection (URTI), acute respiratory infection (ARI) or influenza-like illness (ILI) [16,28,38,40,[50][51][52][53]. We included in the analysis studies addressing microbiology and laboratory diagnosis of viral respiratory infections based on culture, ELISA or PCR methods.…”

MERS: Progress on the global response, remaining challenges and the way forward

“…Since 2012, event-based surveillance among pilgrims returning from Hajj, Umrah and other religious events in KSA has been conducted by KSA and countries sending pilgrims. While many return reporting respiratory symptoms, no MERS-CoV infections have been identified among returning pilgrims (Muraduzzaman et al, 2018;Barasheed et al, 2014;Atabani et al, 2016;Koul et al, 2017;Annan et al, 2015;Ma et al, 2017;Memish et al, 2014aMemish et al, , 2014bRefaey et al, 2017;Al-Abdallat et al, 2017;Matthew et al, 2015;Alqahtani et al, 2016;Win et al, 2016;Yavarian et al, 2018;Kapoor et al, 2014).…”

Acquisition of respiratory and gastrointestinal pathogens among health care workers during the 2015 Hajj season

“…This is in accordance with previous reports showing lack of MERS coronavirus carriage and infection among Hajj pilgrims. [21][22][23][24][25][26] Acquisition and carriage of potentially pathogenic organisms by HCWs do not only constitute a risk for development of disease by the HCWs carriers themselves, but also a risk of transmission and infection of the vulnerable patients they care for. The role of HCWs as a vector for nosocomial infections is well established, 27,28 especially in relation to RTIs.…”