Risk factors for measles among people living in cities under coverage of Jiroft University of Medical Sciences, Jiroft, Iran: A case-control study

Measles is a severe acute respiratory viral infection. The single-stranded RNA morbillivirus from the Paramixoviridea family is easily transmitted among humans through coughing or sneezing droplets.

This was a case-control study that was carried out among people living in cities under coverage of Jiroft University of Medical Sciences, Jiroft, Iran in 2014-2015. Seventy-five patients with confirmed measles (case group) and 150 healthy individuals (control group) were selected for the study. The case group included entered into the study through census method. The control group was randomly selected by simple random sampling from the people who had the inclusion criteria. To control the confounding factors, each case was matched with two persons from the control group for age and gender. Conditional logistic regression was used to analyze the data.

After adjusting for confounding variables, a significant relationship between measles and, not receiving the vaccine (OR=14.35, CI 95%=7.03-29.27), the history of contact with the definite cases of measles (OR=1.9, CI 95%=1.09-3.43), non-native residents (OR=5.46, CI 95%=1.88-15.78), motherchr('39')s age of older than 30 years at birth (OR=2.8, CI 95%=1.23-6.38) were identified.

Based on the findings independent risk factors for developing measles disease were not having measles vaccine, non-native people, history of contact with definite cases of measles and, motherchr('39')s age at birth.