Federal Teaching Hospital Abakaliki (FETHA) and the international medical charity, Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) are to open a new isolation unit at the hospital to contain the outbreak of Lassa fever.
The opening also doubles as honour in memory of health workers who died in the 2018 outbreak of Lassa fever, considered among the largest, MSF said in a statement ahead of the Lassa Fever International Conference starting in Abuja on January 16.
Some 3,498 cases suspected to be Lassa fever were reported across 23 states.
Of the 633 death confirmed to be from Lassa fever, 45 of them were health workers.
The 700-bed FETHA and Ebonyi health ministry were hardest hit, underscoring a need for health workers to protect themselves even while at work.
MSF is helping train staff to “protect themselves from infection,” said Dr Maikore Jacob, MSF medical coordinator in Nigeria.
“Health workers will be required to rapidly identify and safely isolate suspected Lassa fever cases present in the wards,” said Jacob.
“We also aim to develop improved case management practices, and facilitate preventive actions in the community; all these measures are important steps in saving lives and curtailing transmission of the disease.”
MSF is also billed to attend Nigeria’s first-ever international conference on Lassa fever, 50 years since the virus that causes the disease was first isolated in a Borno town named Lassa.
Despite a half century since that discovery, “health workers in West Africa still urgently need appropriate equipment and training to safely manage patients of all ages affected by the disease,” said Hilde De Clerck, the emergency infectious disease referent.
“Research into better tools for timely diagnosis and treatment is also necessary to save more lives in the future.”
Lassa fever affects up to 300,000 people each year across West Africa and causes at least 5,000 deaths, but remains poorly understood.
Only a few laboratories in affected areas can diagnose the virus—which can lead to delays in starting treatment.
It is endemic in Nigeria and most common during the dry season.
The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control routinely warns on infection, prevention and control as central to dealing with Lassa fever.
“One of the major challenges of treating Lassa fever is the nature of the disease itself because at the onset, it mimics diseases like malaria,” said Ebonyi health commissioner, Umezurike Daniel.
“A lot of time is wasted before the patient is actually presented for treatment, and the prognosis gets very bad if treatment is not commenced within six days from the onset of symptoms.
“What we can actually do to contain this is to carry out routine tests on almost everybody that has fever to make sure we provide the appropriate treatment.”
MSF’s integrated Lassa fever project in Ebonyi aims to improve what’s known about the disease and to support the development of best practices in clinical management that can be replicated at health facilities across the country and region of West Africa.
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