A Historical Report of Plague Outbreak in Northwestern Iran, 1966

Plague is an endemic disease to the west of Iran and has frequently stricken this area over the last decades. In 1954, Pasteur Institute of Iran established a research station in the west of the country and since then has monitored the plague outbreaks as well as the disease status in rodents and carnivores by dispatching research teams to different villages and localities. We noticed that there were some valuable data from the past with no records in Journals, among them, a report of a plague outbreak in Seyed Abad village, West Azerbaijan province in 1966. During this 41-day outbreak, 22 people acquired the infection, and 11 died. Fever and buboes were the most predominant clinical symptoms in the patients. The causative agent Yersinia pestis was identified by examination of biopsies from lymph nodes, bacteriological tests, and inoculation of guinea pigs. The bubonic form of the disease and the epidemiological data suggested that the disease might have been transmitted to humans through the infective-bite of the fleas of the wild animals mainly rodents living in the vicinity of the homes of Seyed Abad village