Lassa fever has claimed 167 lives in Nigeria since January, with the death rate climbing to 25.2 per cent even as new infections drop, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention disclosed Thursday.
The agency's week-13 bulletin showed 26 fresh confirmed cases, down from 51 the previous week, yet the case fatality ratio now sits well above the 18.5 per cent recorded in the same stretch of 2025. Bauchi, Ondo, Taraba, Edo and Benue states shoulder 85 per cent of the 663 confirmed infections drawn from 3,831 suspected cases spread across 22 states and 93 councils. Young adults aged 21–30 remain the hardest-hit demographic, with a median age of 30 years.
NCDC blamed the rising toll on late hospital visits, steep treatment costs, poor sanitation and scant community awareness. No new infections were logged among health workers last week. The agency, working with WHO, UNICEF and MSF, has activated an Incident Management System, ramped up surveillance and rolled out targeted protection plans for clinicians in high-burden areas. States have been told to keep sensitisation running year-round and clinicians urged to treat every fever as potentially Lassa until proved otherwise.
A 25.2 per cent case fatality rate for a disease that has been endemic in Nigeria for decades is not a medical mystery; it is a governance indictment. Bauchi, Ondo, Taraba, Edo and Benue have collectively recorded 564 of the 663 confirmed cases, yet none of these states has a functional emergency treatment centre within two hours of every local government area.
The real story behind the climbing death curve is the quiet collapse of primary-care diagnostics. Rapid Lassa PCR tests still cost ₦45,000–₦60,000 in most public hospitals, well above the monthly minimum wage, so patients queue until they bleed. Meanwhile, the 2026 federal capital budget for rodent control in rural markets was slashed by 42 per cent in the last supplementary appropriation signed in February.
For families in Ondo's cocoa belt or Taraba's sesame farms, this means a father who could have survived with a day-one ribavirin drip now risks becoming the village's next cautionary tale. Pregnant women—twice as likely to die once infected—are turning traditional birth attendants into unwilling isolation wards, perpetuating intra-community spread.
Year after year, NCDC issues the same bullet-point advice while state commissioners for health recite "sensitisation" without adding a single diagnostic PCR machine to their reference hospitals. Until Abuja makes test subsidies and community rodent control cash-backed deliverables, the dry season will keep delivering body counts.
