ABUJA (Sundiata Post) – Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole, on Thursday described the outbreak of Lassa fever in Nigeria, which had in the last one week claimed 10 lives across four states, as a national embarrassment.
Adewole, who stated this while making submissions before the Senate Committee on Health on efforts being made by his ministry at curtailing the outbreak, pointed out that the disease, being a native of West Africa, was supposed to have been rendered impotent over the years.
“Unlike Ebola, which took the nation by surprise last year, after being imported from Liberia by an infected person, Lassa fever, which has over the years, registered its presence in the country, supposed not to have taken us by surprise, had infected people reported promptly,” he said.
He recalled that the current outbreak started in August last year in Foka village in Niger State, but snowballed into an outbreak now across nine states of the federation due to non-reportage of its infection and death of victims to the appropriate authorities.
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According to him, the Foka incident in Niger State last year killed no less than 17 villagers in succession without prompt report to the state government due to superstitious belief that their deaths were more of needed ritual for the new village market and not as a result of any strange ailment, which, however, proved to be so, when a child of the village school headmaster died in December.
He said that there are nine laboratory centres across the country for prompt detection of the infectious virus carried by rodents out of which six, are functioning now in Ibadan, Abuja, Maiduguri, Kano, Iruwa etc.
He consequently urged Nigerians to report at the hospitals any fever treated by them without any relief after two days.
“That is the commonest preliminary symptoms of the deadly disease before getting to the advance level of victims committing blood, or blood running from their nostrils, eyes or ears,” he added.
Statistically, the minister stated that the disease, which is very common in Nigeria, Guinea and Sierra Leone, with infection of about 300, 000 people on any year of outbreak, recorded 1,776 cases in Nigeria in 2012; 1,195 in 2013 and 499 cases in 2015.
The four states being ravaged by the outbreak now include: Niger, Bauchi, Kano and Taraba.
