PRESIDENT of the Nigerian Academy of Science (NAS), Prof Oyewale Tomori has blamed the resurgence of Lassa Fever outbreak on the nation’s weak surveillance system, poor funding of epidemiology studies, inadequate diagnostic centres and poor awareness of the disease among Nigerians.

Speaking exclusively with The Guardian on the current outbreak of Lassa Fever in ten states of the federation, Prof Tomori said Nigeria has not taken surveillance system serious in her efforts to curb Lassa Fever.
Tomori added that Nigeria’s lackadaisical attitude towards monitoring and analysis of Lassa Fever data has reflected in her poor drive to create awareness for the disease among Nigerians.

The professor of virology explained that epidemiology departments in the nation’s Ministries of Health are being greatly underfunded, a situation which he said has undermined their ability to spot and alert Nigerians of the disease on time.

Tomori, who was the Regional Virologist for the WHO Africa Region, explained that with strong monitoring and reporting system, Nigeria would have been able to curb the yearly outbreak of the fever, even as he explained that the viral disease mostly occurs in dry season when mastomys rodents, the special rodents that host the virus, would have colonised homes in search of food.

Lassa fever is an acute viral illness that occurs in West Africa. The illness was first discovered in 1969 when two missionary nurses died in Nigeria. The “multimammate rat” or Mastomys rodent, once infected, is able to excrete the virus in urine for an extended time period, maybe for the rest of its life.

Tomori added that one of the problems facing Nigeria in the fight against Lassa fever has been poor funding of the few available diagnostic laboratories, adding that the three best diagnostic laboratories established to detect the disease are located in Ogun, Lagos and Edo states (all in Southern Nigeria) with heavy financial support from some Western nations.

Tomori said: “The other diagnostic laboratories owned by the Federal Government cannot function very well because there is no support from outside. These labs are there, but they are not well funded. But at least, government pays the staff salaries. When you have a person who is well trained, but you not given him reagents, he is as good as useless. I am sure that in about six or nine months, he cannot even remember the training he had because he did not practice it. This is a major problem we have in these other places; they do not have reagents to function. We have said it 200 times, but nobody listens to us.”

As if to lend credence to Tomori’s claim of poor awareness creation on Lassa fever, no single information on the current outbreak has been posted on the Facebook accounts and official websites of both the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) and the National Orientation Agency (NOA), the agency responsible for creating awareness on socio-economic issues .