Virus hunter Peter Piot: My journey back to Ebola ground zero

[undeterred]

Nearly 40 years after he was first dispatched to investigate a mysterious new virus, Peter Piot returns to a village – and a people – changed for ever by the advent of Ebola

“Get on that plane now! You know, they are crazy here!” shouts the manager of Kin Avia, a rare charter airline in the Democratic Republic of Congo with a decent safety track record. It is nearly 10am and for the past few hours we have been trying to get through all the formalities required to travel from the dilapidated domestic airport of Ndolo in the heart of Kinshasa to Bumba – in other words, to get through immigration for a domestic flight. Bumba is the nearest airport in northwestern Congo to our final destination, Yambuku, a village in Equateur province about 1,000km from the capital.

I am spending two weeks in the country to celebrate my 65th birthday and to thank the people who played such an important role in two defining experiences of my life: investigating the first known outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in 1976 and uncovering a significant heterosexual epidemic of HIV/Aids in 1983. I am here with an American film crew making a documentary on epidemics, along with my wife Heidi, an anthropologist, and my friends Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director of the DRC’s National Institute for Biomedical Research, Eugene Nzila, a pioneer of Projet Sida (Africa’s first big Aids research project, founded in 1984) and Annie Rimoin, an epidemiologist from UCLA.

When I was 27 and still in training, I had one of the greatest opportunities an aspiring microbiologist could dream of: the chance to discover a new virus, investigate its mode of transmission and stop the outbreak. It all started when my laboratory at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp received a thermos from what was then called Zaire. It contained the blood of a Flemish nun who had died of what was thought to be yellow fever.

From that sample, however, our lab isolated a new virus, confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and subsequently called Ebola, after a river about 100km north of Yambuku, the centre of the epidemic. It turned out to be one of the most deadly viruses known. In early September 1976, Mabalo Lokela, the headmaster of the local school, had died with a high fever, intractable diarrhoea and bleeding. His death sent a shockwave through the small mission community. Soon the hospital was full of patients with a similar illness and nearly all died within a week.

Read more: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/4c1711c2-d004-11e3-a2b7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz30hDB6TI0

[Warren DeMontague]

1. They need to find a vaccine for that shit.

[undeterred]

2. Its a rare disease and human beings are an 'accidental host'

It does not spread easily under circumstances where there is good sanitation and health care practices.

Apparently there is a vaccine for ebola under development in the US: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=25334

[Warren DeMontague]

3. Sure, but still they ought to develop a vaccine. And as you mention, people are working on one.

As for accidental hosts; a virus is a virus.. It's gonna do the one thing it is programmed to do, and that is reproduce.

When viruses jump species like that, it can be a dangerous scenario.

Being able to vaccinate at risk populations would be helpful, i think. The rarity of the disease is balanced by its undeniable lethality, which lends the issue a certain importance IMHO.