Lassa fever is a disease caused by a virus that lives in the body of certain bush rats. These rats live in the bush around the house, they come into the houses at night and feed on food materials in the house. While feeding the rats urinate and pass faeces containing the lassa virus onto the food materials and disappear back into the bush.

Symptoms

Lassa fever usually starts with fever headache catarrh and joint aches like malaria. Lassa can lead to deafness just after causing these mild symptoms. 80% of all with lassa fever recover but 20% develop more serious symptoms which include bleeding from the ears, vomiting blood, serious tummy pains from internal bleeding into the organs. Also a few may progress to sudden coma and death among other complications. Health workers are very much at risk because lassa fever can be transmitted by contact with an infected person’s body fluids.

Prevention

Covering food very well at night and day especially during planting seasons between December and March every year.

Avoid drying food along roadsides and bushes where these rats may come in contact with human food.

Avoid contact with someone suspected to have lassa fever without proper protection especially if someone is vomiting or bleeding from the body.

Eat garri done with boiled water (eba) if you find rat droppings on the food. Avoid drinking such garri because the rats urine is not visible in the contaminated food.

Do not eat rats. Lassa can infect a person during processing the raw rat meat before cooking the rat. the infection can easily pass through wounds or sores in the hands if it comes in contact with an infected rats body fluids.

Avoid bushes around the house, to prevent the lassa carrying rats breeding around the house

If you have to eat food during a road travel, ensure it is hot. Cold food and contaminated water are notorious as sources of not just lassa fever but other germs that cause food poisoning like staph aureus, norovirus, typhoid fever, cholera and hepatitis A and E.