Lassa fever Nigerian Government begins vaccine trial

Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole, has said a trial vaccine for Lassa fever is currently being processed and will be administered if found to be effective and safe for human consumption.

Adewole said this in a presentation before the Senate Committee on Health in Abuja on Thursday.

The minister explained that the current outbreak began in a village in Niger State sometime in August 2015, but patients were not treated properly due to the ignorance of the villagers.

He explained that the villagers had a superstitious belief that the deaths were as a result of the construction of a new market.

According to him, they believed that each time a new market is built, some people must die for it to prosper and that if anybody talks about the deaths he or she would also die.

Adewale said it was when the son of the village headmaster died that health authorities in Minna were notified and investigations led to the discovery of the outbreak.

He pointed out that by the time data was collected in December 2015, 17 people were already dead.

The minister said, “We call it a candidate vaccine, we have to run it through trial and it will take some time. Hopefully, we will do it this year; if we consider it to be effective and safe, we will put it to use. For now, the vaccine is actually prevention.

“The disease is endemic; endemic means that it is there but occasionally it flares up. I call it a national embarrassment because it has been with us since 2012. What has happened under the current administration is that we are not hiding it; we want to tackle it head-on

“Last year alone, we recorded 441 cases of Lassa fever. What we missed is the situation in Niger and before we got to know, we had lost 17 people unfortunately.”

Meanwhile, The PUNCH learnt on Thursday that the Federal Government had started tracing 35 people believed to have had contact with the patient who died of Lassa fever at the National Hospital, Abuja.