[clarification needed] One year after World War I and despite the persistent problems caused by casualties and infectious diseases in the country resulting from war, the Iranian government decided to renew its relationship with France to promote medical sciences and research concerning different types of endemic infectious diseases.
Such lethal diseases were not hard to imagine considering the poor hygiene and lack of knowledge about the root of transmission, prevention and effective treatment of that time.
In 1871, a severe form of plague outbreak happened in Saghez and Bane (two cities in Kurdistan province) and the Iranian and non-Iranian physicians, such as Dr. Johan Louis Schlimmer, the instructor in the Darolfonun School, were appointed to control this disease.
They started their mission in Northwest of Iran and attempted to prepare an epidemiological map of infectious diseases of the country using a portable laboratory in a truck.
Studies of the plague foci in this region and the importance of this disease motivated Dr. Baltazard, Dr. Shamsa, Dr. Karimi, Dr. Habibi, Dr. Bahmanyar, Dr. Agha Eftekhari, Dr. Farhang Azad, Dr. Seyyedian and Dr. Majd Teymouri to conduct extensive scientific and epidemiologic studies after educating expert technicians and providing sufficient facilities.
[5] During the nine plague outbreaks in Kurdistan and Azerbaijan between 1946 and 1965, many infected people survived from the disease by the efforts of the dispatched teams of Pasteur Institute of Iran; however, 156 died.
During those years, the integration of field and laboratory collaborations was a key to effective epidemiological actions and led to great research hypotheses.
The extensive research by the teams of Pasteur Institute of Iran showed that rodents of the two types Meriones Persicus and Meriones libycus were the main natural reservoirs, unlike their resistance to plague; accordingly, they first proposed that the main reservoir of a disease should be sought amongst the most resistant, not the most sensitive, and such a theory is now accepted as a scientific fact.
In particular, Dr. Xavier Misonne, a Belgian rodentologist who investigated rodent life in Iran[4][10] and Dr. Jean Marie Klein, an entomologist, who conducted extensive research on fleas in the Akanlu center, played important roles.
[11][12] In addition, the aerial photographs of Kurdistan and Hamadan were obtained from Iran's army and rodents' locations and the infection were mapped and reported and the first foundations of GIS were set.
Although Dr. Baltazard left Iran in 1962, plague studies continued to be conducted in the following years[28][29][30] in such a way that in 1978 a new focus of the disease was reported in the Sarab region in Eastern Azerbaijan by Dr. Yunos Karimi and his colleagues.
Great research by Dr. Shamsa and his colleagues led to the first report of this disease among the domestic livestock and wildlife in Northwest and Eastern Iran.
As a result, this study greatly contributed to the identification of wild mammals acting as reservoirs for many zoonotic diseases around the country.