Journal of Clinical & Experimental Pathology
Open Access

Review Article

Viral Haemorrhagic Fever in North Africa; an Evolving Emergency

In association with Libyan Study Group of Hepatitis & HIV

¹Department of Medical Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine, Tripoli, Libya

²Department of Laboratory Medicine, Faculty of Biotechnology, Tripoli, Libya

³Professor of Clinical Microbiology and Microbial Epidemiology, Acting Physician of Internal Medicine, Scientific Coordinator of Libyan National Surveillance Studies of Viral hepatitis & HIV, Tripoli, Libya

*Corresponding Author:

Mohamed A Daw
Department of Medical Microbiology, Faculty of Medicine
Tripoli, Libya
Tel: 00218912144972
Fax: 00218213612231
Email: mohamedadaw@gmail.com

Received date: December 11, 2014; Accepted date: February 26, 2015; Published date: February 28, 2015

Citation: Mohamed A Daw and Abdallah El-Bouzedi (2015) Viral Haemorrhagic Fever in North Africa; an Evolving Emergency. J Clin Exp Pathol 5:215. doi:10.4172/2161-0681.1000215

Copyright: © 2015 Daw MA, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Viral hemorrhagic fever has been associated with high mortality rate which brought serious concern for public health worldwide and prompted a sense of urgency to halt this infection. The clinical symptoms are very general and could be easily missed, consisting of onset of fever, myalgia, and general malaise accompanied by chills. In unstable countries of North Africa with fragile health services complicated with armed conflicts and population displacement, such infections could be easily confused with other local parasitic and viral diseases. Libya has the longest coast in North Africa facing the South European region. Emerging of Viral hemorrhagic fever in this region will pose an evolving risk to the European countries and thus worldwide. An outbreak of unidentified VHFs was reported in June/July 2014 among twenty three African patients from immigrants encamps in North West of Libya, twelve of them reported dead. The clinical and laboratory evidences strongly suggest VHF as the likely cause. Since then no more similar cases were reported till February 2015. With the arrival of viral hemorrhagic fevers in North-West of Libya, the South European countries is now at severe risk, then it is only a matter of time before it becomes apparent in developed countries. This review aims to highlight a recent spread of VHFs in North Africa in the light of political instability associated with massive immigration from the endemic areas of West African countries.

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