BACKGROUND Hajj pilgrimage, in Saudi Arabia, is one of the world's largest religious mass gatherings. We have similar mass gathering scenarios in India such as the Amarnath Yatra and Kumbh. A unique combination of physical, physiological, and psychological factors makes this pilgrimage a very stressful milieu. We studied the emergence of psychopathology and its determinants, in this adverse env...

Hajj, a unique yearly mass gathering pilgrimage of more than 2 million Muslims from around the world, presents enormous challenges to the Saudian Arabia government.1 The potential for deadly epidemic outbreaks of bacterial and viral diseases leading to upper respiratory infection and meningitis and human stampedes call for prompt attention from both pilgrims and the ministry of healt...

Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is a unique mass gathering event that raises public health concerns in the host country and globally. Although gastroenteritis and diarrhea are common among Hajj pilgrims, the microbial etiologies of these infections are unknown. We collected 544 fecal samples from pilgrims with medically attended diarrheal illness from 40 countries dur...

Millions of Muslims travel to Makkah every year to perform Hajj. Many pilgrims come from countries with a high incidence of tuberculosis (TB). Over-crowding, physical exhaustion, heat, and co-morbid conditions of mostly middle-aged and elderly pilgrims make them susceptible to infection, or reactivation of latent TB. Evidence from previous reports indicated a significant risk of acquiring infec...

Religious festivals attract a large number of pilgrims from worldwide and are a potential risk for the transmission of infectious diseases between pilgrims, and to the indigenous population. The gathering of a large number of pilgrims could compromise the health system of the host country. The threat to global health security posed by infectious diseases with epidemic potential shows the import...

BACKGROUND Hajj is the largest annual mass gathering of muslims. The exorbitant crowd of pilgrims and the poor condition of personal hygiene and nutrition are the main predisposing factors for different infections and food poisonings. OBJECTIVES This study investigates a gastroenteritis outbreak among an Iranian caravan of hajj pilgrims. MATERIALS AND METHODS Studying the outbreak was carri...

Emerging Infectious Diseases • www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 10, No. 10, October 2004 1883 inhibition against the following influenza antigens: A/NewCalidonia/ 20/99, A/Wuhan/371/91, A/Sydney/5/ 97, A/Panama/2007/99, B/Sichuan/ 379/99, and B/Harbin/7/94. A diagnosis of influenza was made based on seroconversion with at least a fourfold rise in antibody titer. Based on seroconversion, the influenza att...

We are all familiar with the growth rate of the public Web. Regardless of the metric used to measure its growth attached networks, servers, users or pages the growth rate continues to exhibit an exponential pattern. In the same vein, the adoption rate of intranet and extranet data warehouses (i.e., Web warehouses) has exhibited a similar pattern, although the pattern has lagged public adoption....

In Egypt, vaccination against pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus was required of pilgrims departing for the 2009 Hajj. A survey of 551 pilgrims as they returned to Egypt found 542 (98.1% [weighted]) reported receiving the vaccine; 6 (1.0% [weighted]) were infected with influenza virus A (H3N2) but none with pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus.

BACKGROUND Indonesia provides the largest single source of pilgrims for the Hajj (10%). In the last two decades, mortality rates for Indonesian pilgrims ranged between 200-380 deaths per 100,000 pilgrims over the 10-week Hajj period. Reasons for high mortality are not well understood. In 2008, verbal autopsy was introduced to complement routine death certificates to explore cause of death diagn...