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Nigeria

Nigeria : ALIMA responds to Lassa fever outbreak

DAKAR, January 24, 2018 - ALIMA (The Alliance for International Medical Action) has begun a rapid emergency response to an outbreak of Lassa fever in southern Nigeria in the three most affected States: Ondo, Edo and Ebonyi.

The Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) says there have been 107 suspected cases of Lassa fever reported across 10 States since January 1. Among these, 61 cases have been confirmed, as of January 21, and 16 people, including 3 health workers, have died.

The NCDC activated its Emergency Operations Centre following the increasing number of reported Lassa fever cases. The current number of suspected cases is more than double the average annual caseload recorded in previous years.

“Our first priorities are to support the NCDC, Federal and State Ministries of Health to reinforce health facilities, protect and train hospital staff, improve case management and facilitate actions in the community to control the transmission of the disease,” said Guillaume Le Duc, ALIMA’s Emergency Response Coordinator in Owo, in Ondo State.

Lassa fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic fever that is usually transmitted to humans from the infected urine or feces of the Mastomys rat. Human-to-human transmission is also possible, via contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, putting health workers at an increased risk of infection.

Symptoms of the virus include fever, diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain, sore throat and hemorrhaging. Without proper diagnosis and treatment, during outbreaks Lassa fever mortality rate can reach 30 to 50%. Cases are best managed in isolation units and using a medication called Rivabirin.

“Going beyond this emergency response, Lassa fever is a neglected and not-well understood tropical disease, which is why ALIMA aims to support longer-term research efforts to better understand the dynamics of this disease, develop a rapid diagnostic test and a vaccine, and to optimize the therapeutic course,” said Guillaume Le Duc.

To help support the government’s response, a 6-person emergency team from ALIMA, including an epidemiologist, 3 medical doctors, a logistician and a coordinator, is now on the ground at the Owo Federal Medical Center in Ondo State, where our teams will help support case management, active case detection, patient triage, public awareness campaigns, and reinforce Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) measures among health workers.

Thanks to funding from the ELMA Foundation and the Start Fund, ALIMA will continue to support the Ministry of Health for the next 45 days and maintains close contact with local health authorities in order to help stop the spread of the outbreak.

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The Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA) is a medical humanitarian organization that works hand-in-hand with a network of local organizations to provide quality medical care to the most vulnerable populations in emergency situations and recurrent crises. Based in Dakar, Senegal, ALIMA has treated over 2 million patients in 12 countries since its creation in 2009, and launched more than a dozen research projects focused on malnutrition, malaria and Ebola. ALIMA has extensive experience responding to outbreaks, including Ebola in Guinea, Rift Valley Fever in Niger, Lassa fever in Togo and Dengue fever in Burkina Faso.

ALIMA has been working in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno State since July 2016, where our teams were the first to provide medical and ambulatory nutritional care to internally displaced persons (IDPs) and host populations in Monguno. The program has since expanded to include the opening of a clinic near the makeshift IDP camps in Muna, on the outskirts of Maiduguri, which provides primary medical care to children under the age of five, and treatment for cases of severe malnutrition at the Intensive Therapeutic Feeding Center at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, in Maiduguri.

In 2017, in Nigeria, our teams performed nearly 50,000 pediatric consultations, treated more than 10,000 children for severe acute malnutrition, and helped 2,500 women give birth. In August 2017, ALIMA responded to an outbreak of cholera in Borno State that affected more than 5,000 people.