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Review
. 2017 Jun;55(6):1629-1637.
doi: 10.1128/JCM.00170-17. Epub 2017 Apr 12.

Laboratory Diagnosis of Lassa Fever

Vanessa Raabe  1 , Jeffrey Koehler  2
Affiliations
Review

Laboratory Diagnosis of Lassa Fever

Vanessa Raabe et al. J Clin Microbiol. 2017 Jun.

Abstract

Lassa virus remains an important cause of illness in West Africa and among the travelers returning from this region with an acute febrile illness. The symptoms of Lassa fever can be nonspecific and mimic those of other endemic infections, especially early in illness, making a clinical diagnosis difficult; therefore, laboratory testing is needed to confirm the diagnosis. An early identification of Lassa fever is crucial for maximizing the benefit of available antiviral therapy, as treatment efficacy rapidly decreases following the clinical onset of the disease. This minireview provides an overview of the currently available diagnostic tests for Lassa fever and their strengths and weaknesses.

Keywords: Lassa fever.

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Figures

FIG 1
FIG 1
Lassa virus sequence diversity complicates efficacious assay design. Full and partial Lassa virus nucleic acid sequences were acquired from GenBank for the S RNA segment (A) and L RNA segment (B), and amino acid sequences for glycoprotein (GPC) (C) and nucleoprotein (NP) (D) were generated. Sequences were aligned, and phylogenetic trees (neighbor joining, Jukes-Cantor) were generated using CLC Genomics Workbench. Highlighted sections illustrate the geographic distribution and variability of Lassa virus.
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