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Paris – Congolese expert Jean-Jacques Muyembe may be little known to the public, but he has been one of the world’s top Ebola investigators since the first epidemic erupted in central Africa in 1976.
Now, amid a decline in a west African outbreak that has taken more than 11,000 lives, Muyembe warns that Ebola will strike again in the future and that the deadly virus poses “a threat to the whole world”.
Muyembe studied medicine in Kinshasa and at the University of Leuven in Belgium. He returned home to the Democratic Republic of Congo – then known as Zaire – in 1976, when the northern village of Yambuku was struck by a mysterious disease.
“They said many people were dying and the health ministry asked me to go investigate,” said Muyembe.
He initially thought it could be a case of typhoid fever but he decided to continue investigating until he got to the bottom of it. “I drew blood and had no protective gloves or clothing,” Muyembe said.
Accompanied by a Belgian nun suffering from fever, he returned from Yambuku to Kinshasa.
It was her blood samples, shipped in a makeshift cooler to the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, that enabled scientist Peter Piot to identify the worm-looking virus for the first time.
It was then named after the Ebola river, located near the area first hit by the epidemic. “Then there was total silence until 1995,” Muyembe said.
That year, he was summoned to Tikwit in the south of DR Congo where a bloody diarrhoea outbreak was decimating the population, including medical staff.
“I examined an Italian nun and saw signs that reminded me of the Yambuku incident,” Muyembe said.
He discovered that contamination “had taken place in the operation room – in other words, from the patient’s blood”. His discovery that the virus is transmitted through bodily fluids was a key find.- AP
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