Lassa fever resources is an online repository of social science research and other information about Lassa fever and its management. The materials on this website will be useful to responders during outbreaks of Lassa fever; Public Health professionals seeking to manage endemic Lassa fever; and researchers or members of the general public who want to know more about the disease. The website has been built through a participatory process involving social scientists from affected countries, international scholars, and people with clinical and ecological expertise on Lassa fever. The project is led by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, Durham University, and the Robert Koch Institut Berlin.
Lassa fever resources gathers knowledge and expertise in a single place for on-demand access. We aim to make existing research easily accessible; to summarise key findings of existing research in an accessible format; to highlight policy recommendations that can be drawn from existing research, and provide a database of people with social science expertise in Lassa fever in each of the affected west African countries. We will also use the network as a means to shape the future research agenda on Lassa fever and to develop future research collaborations. All contributions to the website are welcome. For ways to contact us or to submit a resource, please see the Contact page or email resources@lassafever.info
How we made this website
This website has been developed through a participatory approach involving experts from the international scientific community, including representatives from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Guinea, the UK, Germany, and the US. We worked together to map existing literature and expertise, to sort existing research into categories, and to pull out relevant findings for policy around Lassa fever. Through this participatory process, we have endeavoured to capture literature that can sometimes be missed in literature reviews, including grey literature and unpublished material, and to foreground the expertise of scholars based in west African institutions. Our website also documents places where we think there are gaps in existing literature and further research is required.
Much of this work was carried out at side meeting to the first international conference on Lassa fever, Lassa at 50: Rising to the challenge, hosted by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in Abuja, 16th-17th January 2019. We are grateful to all who participated, including representatives from the NCDC, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the U.S Centers for Disease Control, the Robert Koch Institut in Berlin and Durham University. We acknowledge the financial support of the UK's Global Challenges Research Fund through an impact acceleration award, the Robert Koch Institut Berlin and the NCDC.
