A hospital outbreak of CCHF in Mauritania alerted authorities to sporadic cases occurring in the community; in all, 38 persons were infected.

Phylogenetic studies demonstrated that outbreak strains belonged to the East-Central African lineage.

The extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) has been measured at both the K edges of cadmium and tellurium in CdTe, from liquid helium to room temperature, in order to investigate the local thermodynamic behaviour. The temperature dependences of the structural parameters obtained from the separate analysis of the two edges are perfectly consistent. The positive contribution to the thermal expansion due to the bond stretching and the negative contribution due to the tension effects are disentangled and quantified in terms of the bond thermal expansion and the perpendicular mean square relative displacement. The comparison with previous EXAFS results for Ge and CuCl shows that relevant correlations can be established between a number of local parameters measured by means of EXAFS and the properties of the lattice negative thermal expansion of tetrahedrally bonded semiconductors. The effective force constants derived from the EXAFS are compared with the force constants of a valence force field model.

A combined approach has been used to study thermal effects on the extended x-ray absorption fine-structure ͑EXAFS͒ of copper between 4 and 500 K. A phenomenological data analysis shows that the thermal expansions measured from the first and third cumulants significantly differ between each other and from the crystallographic thermal expansion. Path-integral Monte Carlo calculations of EXAFS cumulants have been performed, using a many-body potential. The good reproduction of experimental values validates the phenomenological analysis and opens more perspectives for applications to more complex systems. It is shown that the reproduction of EXAFS parameters allows for a test of the interaction potentials with regard to anharmonicity.

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