Summary4 points
- 92 per cent of surveyed herdsmen in Kwara State tested positive for a deadly tick-borne virus.
- The disease kills up to half of severe human cases, with no vaccine or specific treatment.
- Infected cattle show no outward symptoms, making exposure hard to predict or avoid.
- Nigeria's CDC issued its first coordinated risk assessment on the disease only in 2025.
In a study of herdsmen in Kwara State, ninety-two per cent tested positive for past exposure to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus, compared with just seven per cent among hospital patients being treated for unrelated fevers in the same area. Herdsmen who reported a history of tick bites were nearly two hundred times more likely to carry the exposure than those who had not.
The virus, spread mainly through tick bites and direct contact with the blood of infected livestock, kills up to half the people it infects severely enough to cause symptoms, according to research from a Ghanaian abattoir study on the same pathogen. There is no vaccine and no specific treatment. For a country where cattle herding remains a major livelihood across the north, that combination of high exposure and no medical safety net deserves far more attention than it currently gets.
A Disease Nigeria Has Lived With Longer Than It Has Studied
Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever is not new to Nigeria. Dugbe virus, a close relative in the same family of tick-borne pathogens, was first identified in the country back in 1964. Yet researchers studying the Kwara State findings describe human data on the disease in Nigeria as limited, with testing available in only a handful of research settings rather than as part of routine health screening for people whose work puts them in daily contact with cattle and ticks.
That gap matters because the animals carrying the virus rarely show any sign of illness. Cattle infected with the virus stay outwardly healthy while carrying it in their blood, according to researchers studying the disease across Africa, which means a herder has no way to tell which animal is safe to handle and which is not.
What The Numbers Show Across Nigeria
The Kwara State findings are not an isolated result. A separate study of cattle in the same state found nearly seventy-two per cent tested positive for the virus, with over half also carrying antibodies to Dugbe virus, and more than a third exposed to both. In Plateau State, about thirty per cent of sampled cattle tested positive, with older animals showing meaningfully higher exposure than younger ones. In north-central Nigeria, researchers collected nearly fifteen hundred ticks from just over three hundred pastoralist cattle in a single sampling effort, evidence of how heavily infested working herds can be.
A separate survey of cattle farmers in Borno State found close to sixty per cent had been bitten by a tick themselves. Manually crushing ticks between the fingers rather than using tweezers or a tool, a common traditional practice among herders removing ticks from cattle, is a direct route for infected blood to reach broken skin, and researchers flagged it as one of the clearest behavioural risks in the survey.
Nigeria’s Response Is Only Just Beginning
Nigeria’s Centre for Disease Control published a qualitative risk assessment of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever in 2025, calling for a coordinated One Health response spanning human health, veterinary services, and agriculture ministries. That is a meaningful first step, but it arrives after decades in which the virus has clearly been circulating in cattle across multiple states, largely outside routine surveillance.
Researchers studying the disease across Africa note that livestock herders, slaughterhouse workers, and veterinarians consistently show up as the highest-risk occupational groups, not because the disease targets them specifically, but because their daily work puts them in direct contact with tick bites and animal blood far more often than the general population.
What This Means For Herding Families
With no vaccine available, prevention is the only real defence right now. That means using gloves or a tool rather than bare fingers to remove ticks from cattle, treating herds with acaricides to reduce tick loads, wearing protective clothing while handling livestock, and seeking medical attention quickly after a fever following a known tick bite or contact with a sick animal’s blood, rather than treating it as an ordinary illness.
None of that requires a hospital’s worth of infrastructure, and none of it depends on Nigeria first building broader testing capacity. What it does require is herding communities actually knowing the risk exists, which the Kwara State numbers suggest most currently do not.
