He listed the signs and symptoms of Lassa-Fever as fever, sore throat, cough, chest pain, bleeding from the nose, mouth, ears and eyes among others.
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While health authorities assure Africa’s most populous country of more than 170 million they have the haemorrhagic virus under control, there are fears the scale of the outbreak is being downplayed.
Adewole gave the directive to the Executive Director National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) Dr. Ado Muhammad when he visited the community where 16 people were killed by the current Lassa fever outbreak on Wednesday 13th January 2016.
“It is possible we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg”, Chikwe Ihekweazu, an infectious disease epidemiologist, told AFP.
Professor Adewole noted that it was failure of the notification system that made it impossible for the Ministry to respond promptly to the situation in Niger state, reiterating that the federal government’s mission and mandate in the health sector was to keep every Nigerian safe.
The death of a Lassa Fever victim at the National Hospital in Abuja, the nation’s capital, had brought the total number of deaths to 43 in the country, from 10 states.
It was first described in 1969 in the town of Lassa in Nigeria.
“They thought it was related to some traditional things they were doing at the time, so there was cultural secrecy surrounding it”, said Asuzu, who is chairing an expert committee appointed by the government to investigate the outbreak.
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Dr. Adeyanju, who explained that the government had put the 31 persons who had contact with the victims on surveillance, said that such would prevent the endemic disease from spreading. It is transmitted to humans from contacts with food or household items contaminated with rat excreta.
