Retraction of: Scientific Reports 10.1038/s41598-017-17132-4, published online 01 December 2017
Editors have retracted this Article.
After publication of this paper concerns about ethical oversight of this study were brought to the attention of the Editors. The paper cites approval from an institutional ethics committee in France, but samples used in this study were also sourced from Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Niger. The Authors were not able to provide documentation of approval from ethics committees in these countries, or of compliance with local regulations regarding the use of such samples in research.
Stéphane Ranque, Esam I. Azhar, Muhammad Yasir, Asif A. Jiman-Fatani, Didier Raoult, and Fadi Bittar disagree with the retraction. Ibrahim Hamad and Hervé Tissot-Dupont did not reply to the correspondence from the Editors.