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Health workers target venous ticks at the heart of Iraq’s worst discovered outbreak of a fever that causes a person to bleed to death by spraying a cow with pesticides. As the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic flu spreads from animals to humans, the sight of health workers dressed in full protective gear has become common in the Iraqi countryside. According to the World Health Organization, Iraq has recorded 19 deaths among 111 CCHF cases in living beings this year.
The virus has no vaccine, and its onset can be sudden, resulting in severe internal and external bleeding, particularly from the nose. According to doctors, it kills in up to two-fifths of cases.
“The number of cases recorded is unparalleled,” said Haidar Hantouche, a Dhi Qar province health official.
The province, a poor farming region in southern Iraq, accounts for almost half of Iraq’s cases.
In previous years, he said, cases could be counted “on the ring finger.”
Virus hosts include both wild and farmed living creatures such as buffalo, cattle, goats, and sheep, all of which are prevalent in Dhi Qar.
Tick stings
A team disinfects animals in a stable beside a house where a woman was infected in the village of Al-Bujari. Workers spray pesticides on a cow and her two calves while wearing masks, goggles, and overalls.
Ticks that have gone down from the cow and been collected in a container are displayed by a worker.
According to the World Health Organization, “animals become afflicted by the bite of infected ticks.”
“The CCHF virus is transmitted to humans through tick bites or contact with infected animal blood or tissues during and instantly after slaughter,” the report continues.
Officials have been taken aback by the year’s surge in cases, which far outnumber those recorded in the 43 years since the disease was first identified in Iraq in 1979.
According to Hantouche, only 16 cases resulting in seven deaths were recorded in his province in 2021. However, Dhi Qar has documented 43 cases this year, including eight deaths.
The numbers are still small in comparison to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has resulted in over 25,200 lives lost and 2.3 million documented cases in Iraq, according to WHO figures, but health workers are concerned.
According to the WHO, the fatality rate of CCHF ranges between 10% and 40% in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Balkans.
Ahmed Zouiten, the WHO’s representative in Iraq, stated that there are several “hypotheses” for the country’s epidemic.
They included tick spread during Covid in 2020 and 2021 in the absence of livestock spraying campaigns.
And, “very cautiously,” he said, “we attribute part of this epidemic to global warming, which has prolonged the period of tick multiplication.”
