The Minister of State for Health, Dr Osagie Ehanire has said there is urgent need to review actions taken before and during the outbreak of Lassa fever so as to improve the country’s level of preparedness and response to epidemic outbreaks.
He disclosed this on Monday in Abuja at the 2016/2017 Lassa Fever Outbreak After Action Review and Preparedness meeting held to review and strengthen the preparedness and response measures of Nigeria to combat Lassa fever.
He said while working to ensure that Nigeria is de-visited from Lassa fever endemic countries, necessary infrastructure will be put in place to combat the ugly scourge.
“We are going to put in place the necessary infrastructure that will help in improving case management to bring down mortality associated with Lassa fever.
“We are taking about standard isolation wards across the country, high quality standard diagnostic centers to reduce the delays and consequences and provide Lassa fever management commodities.” He said.
He added that the federal government will work through the Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC) to ensure that caregivers are protected while providing care for lassa fever patients.
Furthermore, he revealed that the burden of Lassa fever has progressively increased with this year’s outbreak exceeding into the rainy season with 22 states affected so far and about 8 states still active in the outbreak.
Earlier on, the Chief Executive Officer of Nigerian Center for Disease Control, Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu said Lassa fever might get worse before it gets better in Nigeria as the country is not diagnosing most of the cases happening because of the limited diagnostic centers in the country.
In terms of our diagnostic capacity, Chikwe said the four functional diagnostic centers for Lassa in Nigeria lacks the capacity to test every case with presentation of Lassa in the country, thus, there is a need to improve our capacity to detect the disease and laboratory capacity to confirm the cases.
“Because it takes so many efforts to confirm a case, we are not confirming all the cases but only confirming a few. We must accept that it is a very difficult virus to deal with as we are only detecting the tip of the iceberg of Lassa fever virus.” He explained
He added that it is impossible to differentiate early symptoms of Lassa fever from malaria, making it difficult to fight the ugly scourge unless malaria is successfully ruled out of Nigeria.
Prof Oyewale Tomori, the Lassa Fever Control Committee Chairman said Lassa fever in Nigeria has been neglected for too long while recalling that the first case emerged 48years ago.
He outlined the challenges that keep bringing back such disease outbreak to be, inability to handle and follow up on success, using disease outbreaks as panic opportunity to generate funds that ended in the conduit of perusal gains, unstable and dysfunctional disease surveillance structure and consistency in neglecting minor problems.
Daily Trust.
