Resources

Lassa Fever: a rodent-human interaction

This resource examines the sites of interactions between humans and the multimammate mouse, Mastomys natalensis. It presents findings such as new arenaviruses in other African rodents and in snakes, that  argue preferably toward the host-switching concept. The recent emergence in Sierra Leone, the absence of virus positive Mastomys between the two endemic zones and poor virus diversity in the Mano River area also point in the direction of a unique import of Lassa virus from Nigeria to Sierra Leone during the 19th century. This resource also discusses the hypothesis of human displacements through the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition in 1807.

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Improving burial practices and cemetery management during an Ebola virus disease epidemic — Sierra Leone, 2014

This piece is a summary of an assessment conducted in Sierra Leone on the acceptability of safe, nontraditional burial practices and cemetery management during the Ebola Outbreak. Both measures aimed the control of the virus transmission. Some of the findings were: scarce burial teams, miscoordination among Ebola response bodies, lack of systematic procedures for testing and reporting results on dead bodies from Laboratories, inadequate cementerie space, no acceptance of safe burial practices by communities. These finding informed a standard operating procedure (SOP) for safe, dignified medical burials.

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