A virus rarely detected in France. The Ministry of Health announced Thursday that a hospitalized patient, a soldier returned from abroad, had been confirmed as suffering from Lassa fever, a viral hemorrhagic fever whose virus is endemic in certain African countries, indicates the AFP.
The patient is currently hospitalized in Île-de-France and “his state of health does not cause concern,” the ministry said in a press release published Thursday evening. “A thorough epidemiological investigation is underway to determine the people who may have been in risky contact with the patient.”
Risks of other cases?
The virus can be transmitted from person to person “by direct contact with the blood, urine, excrement or other organic secretions of an infected person. The risk of secondary cases occurring is therefore limited to people who have had direct contact with the patient’s biological fluids, in particular health personnel who took care of them,” recalls the ministry.
Contact persons at risk “were contacted by the health authorities,” he added. You must “monitor the appearance of symptoms for 21 days after the last risky contact” and “if symptoms appear, including fever, isolate yourself and contact a doctor”.
What is this virus?
Lassa fever is a hemorrhagic fever caused by an Arenavirus, the Lassa virus, which takes its name from the town of the same name in northern Nigeria, where it was first identified in 1969. It is endemic in several West African countries (Nigeria, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone), where it infects 100,000 to 300,000 people per year, of whom 5,000 to 6,000 die, according to the Pasteur Institute.
The majority of cases are asymptomatic (80%). If it is symptomatic, Lassa fever manifests itself by fever, vomiting, nausea, abdominal pain, headache, myalgia, arthralgia, asthenia. “In severe cases, the symptoms then worsen, with the appearance of edema, hemorrhagic signs, pericardial and pleural effusions, and more rarely encephalitis. The patient died in a context of hypotensive and hypovolemic shock and renal and hepatic failure,” explains the Pasteur Institute.
Lassa fever is especially very serious in pregnant women, frequently leading to the death of the mother and systematically to that of the fetus. Furthermore, a third of patients who survive the infection then present serious after-effects such as unilateral or bilateral deafness, temporary or permanent, and myocarditis.
