Resources

Material Proximities and Hotspots: Toward an Anthropology of Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers

This resource outlines a research program for an anthropology of viral hemorrhagic fevers and reviews the social science literature on Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa fevers and charts areas for future ethnographic attention. The paper suggests that attention to the material proximities between animals, humans, and objects, that constitute the "hotspot", opens a frontier for critical and methodological development in medical anthropology and for future collaborations in viral hemorrhagic fever management and control.

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Lassa fever is unheralded problem in West Africa

This resource describes primary and secondary transmission of Lassa fever and barrier nursing techniques as a means to prevent this.

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Lassa fever in West Africa: Evidence for an expanded region of endemicity

This resource presents evidence for an expanded endemicity zone between the two known Lassa endemic regions indicating that Lassa virus is more widely distributed throughout the Tropical Wooded Savanna ecozone in West Africa.

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World Health Organisation (WHO): Lassa fever

This is the WHO emergencies website page for Lassa fever.

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Diversity and dynamics in a community of small mammals in coastal Guinea, West Africa

This resource investigated three villages in high endemic zones of Lassa fever in Guinea and presents the biodeiversity of the small mammal community identified through standardized trapping in houses, cultivations and forest.

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Fluctuation of abundance and Lassa virus prevalence in Mastomys Natalensis in Guinea, West Africa

This study investigates the link between the ecology of the M. Natalensis and the incidence of Lassa fever in human cases in Guinea. They found that the risk for Lassa virus transmission was present in both rainy and dry season; however the risk increased in the dry season because of the possibility of encountering rodent excreta in the houses.

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Shadowlands and dark corners: An anthropology of light and zoonosis

This paper outlines the importance of the house construction and the light for the human and rodent interactions in Upper Guinea (Guinea). To address this interspecies entanglements it is necessary to have in mind how darkness created by furniture and the house design can expand the activity of the animal and the persistence of virus in surfaces. It also highlights the difficulty to localize the trapping of small rodents by kids.

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Risk maps of Lassa fever in West Africa

With the aim of gaining more information to control this disease, this paper carries out a spatial analysis of Lassa fever data from human cases and infected rodent hosts covering the period 1965–2007. 

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