Long neglected, Lassa fever is surging in West Africa. Researchers want to know why.
Sitting on a bench outside the Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital (ISTH) in Edo state in southwestern Nigeria in September 2023, Muhammed Luqman Dagana recounted his ordeal earlier in the year with Lassa fever, a deadly hemorrhagic disease of West Africa. At first the 33-year-old wasn’t alarmed—his fever, headache, body aches, and cough were innocuous enough. A doctor at his local clinic gave him antibiotics for typhoid fever and antimalarial drugs. But his symptoms persisted, so he tried another clinic. Again, the diagnosis was malaria and typhoid.
Dagana continued to decline, his fever fluctuating wildly. When a third clinic referred him to the general hospital here, he was barely able to walk and was having trouble breathing. Ten days after his symptoms began, he was finally diagnosed with Lassa fever and immediately transferred to the hospital’s high-containment isolation ward. By then Dagana was in and out of consciousness, with acute renal failure.
The experience was “terrible, horrible,” said Dagana, who is married and has a young son. “People were suffering around me. I could hear them crying out.” A member of his community was brought in unconscious; 20 minutes later he was dead. “I was so frightened.”