Word: lassa
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Initially, some doctors thought the ailment was a form of Lassa fever, a highly lethal and still untreatable viral disease, usually transmitted by rodents, which was first discovered in a Nigerian town in 1969. Now the mystery has been solved. In Geneva last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that scientists at Atlanta's CDC, Antwerp's Institute for Tropical Medicine and Britain's Microbiological Research Establishment had all identified the killer as a form of Marburg virus disease, an extremely rare ailment first spotted in 1967 among lab workers in Marburg, West Germany, handling organs...
...researchers screened the tissues for evidence of antibodies to bird-carried viruses. The results were negative. CDC tests found no indication of either plague or typhoid fever. So the search went on into more exotic terrain. Tests also ruled out tularemia (rabbit fever), a deadly tropical disease known as Lassa fever, and Marburg disease, a viral disease from Africa. Further screening seemed to dismiss fungi as a suspect; no fungus is known to produce the fatally fulminating pneumonia typical of Legion disease...
...sure whether Lassa virus belongs to Casals' favorite group of arboviruses. It is related, he suggests, to a virus that causes a devastating Bolivian hemorrhagic fever (TIME, July 19, 1963). Whatever its nature, it may be widespread in sub-Saharan Africa, but relatively unknown to authorities because natives die of it in the bush without seeking medical...
Where does the virus live, and how is it transmitted? No one knows, but Frame's serum collection offered a clue. It contained a Lassa-positive specimen from Carrie Moore, who had a similar illness in Guinea, 1,500 miles west of Lassa, when she worked there as a teacher in 1965. Although Mrs. Moore recovered, her fever left her stone-deaf. Her quarters, she recalls, were infested with mice that left their droppings all over her room and the kitchen. Nurse Pinneo also remembers mice droppings in the mission hospital at Jos. If mice are indeed carriers...
...setting up a special isolation laboratory, in which the strange and deadly disease can be studied. There appeared to be good reason for haste. From the mission hospital at Jos came reports of an influx of patients, some dying, with symptoms that closely matched those of the "new" Lassa fever...