The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) has warned states yet unaffected in the ongoing epidemic of Lassa fever not to relax.
President of the association, Dr Kayode Obembe, warned in a statement on Monday that “all states have the potential to be at risk of being affected, if we neglect to observe basic personal and communal hygiene at individual, family and community levels.”
States as far flung as Bauchi, Kano, Nasarawa, Niger and Edo have reported cases among the more than 120 already confirmed as Lassa fever, and deaths have topped 40—five times more than the number of people killed in 2014 Ebola outbreak.
NMA raised concern about present dry season being the season Lassa fever was most likely, because bush burning drove rats from bushes into homes. “Local and cultural habits of drying foods on the roads, streets and even around houses, carelessly also provide avenues for the spread of the virus,” said Obembe. The virus is carried in multimammate rats (the common soft-furred African rat whose female has a double row of breasts), which normally live in bushes and visit nearby homes for food, which they contaminate. Eighty percent of Lassa fever cases pass unnoticed with symptoms similar in many common diseases as mild fevers, body aches, tiredness and loss of appetite.
But severe cases progress with sore throat, cough, vomiting, diarrhoea and unexplained bleeding from body openings. Deaths may eventually occur, the association explained. “Hospital or other man-to-man transmission of the infection follow contamination with food or body fluid transfers, providing the reasons why home members and health workers wherever Lassa fever subjects exist or are taken for came must all practice the highest levels of personal and/or professional hygiene,” said Obembe.
An assessment team for Lassa fever is already visiting states, and a national action committee is to be inaugurated on Tuesday as health commissioners and heads of federal hospitals gather for an emergency National Council of Health meeting.
By: Judd-Leonard Okafor
Daily Trust News
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