“Given the many competing health priorities in West Africa – exacerbated by the current Ebola epidemic – it is essential that we know the relative risk of human-to-human transmission of other potentially deadly diseases, such as Lassa fever,” says first author Dr Gianni Lo Iacono from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge. “That way, public health officials can decide where to focus their public health campaigns and how to prevent or respond to potential outbreaks.”

The researchers, part of the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium, used mathematical modelling to analyse data from outbreaks known to be due to human-to-human chains of transmission, and calculated the ‘effective reproductive number’. This number represents the number of secondary infections from a typical infected individual – for an outbreak to take hold, this number needs to be greater than one.  They compared data from hundreds of Lassa infected patients from Kenema Government Hospital, in Sierra Leone, who could have been infected either by rodents or humans, with the data from human-to-human chains. By considering the effective reproductive numbers, they inferred the proportion of patients infected by humans rather than rodents. Read more..