John Aiyepada

TL;DR: Deep sequencing of 179 patient samples processed by the European Mobile Laboratory, the first diagnostics unit to be deployed to the epicentre of the outbreak in Guinea, reveals an epidemiological and evolutionary history of the epidemic from March 2014 to January 2015, providing an unprecedented window into the evolution of an ongoing viral haemorrhagic fever outbreak.

TL;DR: Responding to fears that a 10-fold surge in cases in Nigeria in 2018 signaled an incipient outbreak, Kafetzopoulou et al. performed metagenomic nanopore sequencing directly from samples from 120 patients, finding no strong evidence of a new strain emerging nor of person-to-person transmission; rather, rodent contamination was the main source.

TL;DR: It is found that the increase in cases was not attributable to a particular Lassa virus strain or sustained by human‐to‐human transmission, and the data were consistent with ongoing cross‐species transmission from local rodent populations.

TL;DR: This study sequenced and isolated 77 Lassa virus strains from 16 Nigerian states, and modeled how the virus spread in the country, providing a deeper understanding of the geography of genetic lineages and sublineages of the virus in Nigeria.

TL;DR: There were significantly elevated case fatality rates and elevated liver transaminase levels in subjects whose samples were RDT positive compared to RDT negative in the 2018 LF outbreak in Nigeria.