Clinical-Epidemiological Study of Measles Trends from 2019-2023 in Iraq

Abstract

Measles, a highly contagious viral infection, which belongs to the Morbilivirus genus, Paramyxoviridae family. Remains a significant public health challenge worldwide, despite the availability of an effective vaccine. The objective is to determine the outcome of measles cases in Iraq and determine of measles trend from 2019-2023. The study is an epidemiological retrospective cross-sectional study that included information on Measles disease from 2019/January/1st to 2023/December/31st. The duration of data collection continued for the period from 2024/October/17th to 2025/February /28th. The data of the whole Iraq was collected from: Iraqi Ministry of Health\ Department of Public Health\ Communicable Disease Control Center from section of epidemiological surveillance that locates in Baghdad Governorate and obtains the information from health departments in the Iraq. The study included 3,873 laboratory-confirmed measles cases out of over 20,000 suspected cases. Descriptive statistics were applied, and inferential tests including the independent t-test, ANOVA, and chi-square test were used for data analysis via SPSS software (version 29.0), with a significance level set at p < 0.05. The clinical information show that the highest number of patients were from hospitals with 80.17% of patients, in contrast to primary health centers with 19.83%, the clinical methods of diagnosis had the highest ratio of result than others methods with 55.38%,)  15607 patients had diagnosed at hospital Lab 2.13% with positive result ,while 97.87% of the patients had negative result , The most of the cases had ELISA IgM test with 99.95% and the rest cases had Tissue Culture with 0.05%.Its reappearance the outbreak of measles  has been facilitated by dwindling vaccination rates, inadequate healthcare systems, and the dissemination of false information. Its prevalence is 4104,728,199,633 and 14571 cases for the years (2019-2023) respectively, in Iraq. Regard to outcome of measles cases 99.94 % was cured.