NANFeatures /Vol. 11/No.25/2017 (Feb. 2)
Preventing Lassa fever: The Lagos State example
A News Analysis by Peter Ejiofor, News Agency of Nigeria (NAN)
No sooner than the confirmation by the Federal Ministry of Health of the recent resurgence of Lassa fever in Nigeria that the Lagos State government evolved a pragmatic approach to preventing the virus.
Fever, general weakness, headache, sore throat, muscle pain, chest pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, cough and abdominal pain, among others symptons, precede Lassa fever, an acute viral haemorrhagic illness caused by Lassa virus.
The disease is transmitted when a human comes into contact with an infected rat’s feces, urine, or the bodily fluids of an infected human.
However, species of rats — mastomys — carries the virus while they breed frequently and bear many offsprings, increasing the potential for the spread of the virus from rats to humans.
During the recent resurgence of the disease in 2016, no fewer than 154 people died from illnesses arising from the disease across the country.
States that were affected included Lagos State, Niger, Bauchi State, Kano State, Edo, Nassarawa State, Borno, Kogi, Oyo State, Taraba, Plateau, Ondo State, Ebonyi, Ogun, Rivers and the Federal Capital Territory, among other states.
Worried by the resurgence, Gov. Akinwunmi Ambode instructed the health officials and Environmental Health Officers in the state to prevent the disease by killing rats in markets and public places across the state.
With the directive, more than 77,000 rats were killed while the government set up surveillance and quarantine centres in different parts of the state to ensure that schools and public institutions were safe.
It also strengthened the capacity of its hospitals, especially at the secondary and tertiary levels, to cope with any emergency cases.
For effectiveness, the Lagos State Ministry of the Environment in company with Phosguard Fumigants Nigeria Ltd., adopted another approach to preventing the disease.
With Phosguar’s “Operation Kill Rats, Make More Money in Lagos’’ to depopulate rats in the state, the stage was set for making Lagos State Lassa fever free.
The Chief Executive Officer of Phosguard, Mr Oluwasegun Benson, said the operation would also prevent rats from multiplying across the mega-city state.
He said the company used environment-friendly substances to kill rats in residential places and markets that made them to decompose without emitting infections.
Inaugurating the operation recently in Obalende Market, Benson said the traders in the markets complied with the prescribed environmental laws.
To boost the operation, he also said that the state government had donated two vehicles to ease movement of men and materials.
“We have done sensitisation in markets but we are not stopping at that; part of our resolution is that our advocacy team will go into the markets for continuous sensitisation.
“We will publish the statistics of rats that we have been able to kill and the location in which they are killed.
“This will help us in the future to draw a survey and a basic data in terms of the worth of the operation,’’ he said.
Benson said the traders had been mobilised and were showing interest in the operation such that “some people are not interested in selling the rats because they take it as a civic duty.
“They believe that if they are not doing anything and rats within the environment are being killed, the action should be part of their contribution to get rid of the rats.
“But some people are selling it to us and of which we have been doing skeletal purchases; for now, the company will buy a rat for N10.’’
Irrespective of efforts by appropriate authorities to prevent Lassa fever, analysts insist that an adequate report of cases of the disease in any part of Africa is important.
Nigeria Centre for Disease Control notes that while health authorities in Africa’s most populous country say they have the virus under control, there are fears the actual scale of the outbreak is under-reported.
Observers note that the resurgence of Lassa fever was only announced in Jan. 2016 — months after the first case of the disease happened in Aug. 2015 — with subsequent deaths reported in 10 states, including Abuja.
Yet, the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention believes that the number of Lassa fever infections in West Africa every year is between 100,000 and 300,000 people with about 5,000 deaths.
Lassa fever belongs to the same family as Marburg and Ebola, two deadly viruses that lead to infections with fever, vomiting and, in worse case scenarios, haemorrhagic bleeding.
Its name is derived from the town of Lassa in northern part of Nigeria where it was first identified in 1969.(NANFeatures)
**If used, please credit the writer as well as News Agency of Nigeria (NAN)