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It is now more than four decades since Professor Peter Piot sped from a clinical lab in the bustling Belgian city of Antwerp to a remote rainforest in the heart of Africa to investigate a mysterious epidemic.
Three weeks earlier the microbiology lab where the then 27-year-old worked had received two vials of blood transported halfway across the globe in a cheap blue thermos flask filled with ice. One of the test tubes had smashed, but at the time in 1976 Prof Piot and his colleagues were unaware of the danger lurking inside. The two vials contained a new but highly contagious virus which we now know as Ebola – a disease which has killed more than 2,000 people in a 13-month outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The blood samples were from Flemish nuns living in what was then known as Zaire, who had died of a mysterious haemorrhagic fever. Within three weeks the virus had killed 200 people in Yambuku, a small village in the Congolese forest home to a Belgian missionary outpost.
“The discovery itself was an accident, or a coincidence,” Prof Piot says, sitting in his directors' office at the London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine, which celebrated its 120th anniversary this autumn . “We obviously did not know there was Ebola in the samples from Zaire. Looking back, probably the most dangerous moments were working in the lab in Antwerp.”
It wasn’t long before the team, examining the virus’ gigantic worm structure under a microscope, realised this was a new disease and sent the samples to the specialist Centre for Disease Control in the US for confirmation. Within weeks Prof Piot was on a flight – without so much as a valid passport. “I’m trying not to exaggerate, but in less than 48 hours I went from Antwerp to the tropical rainforest in northern Zaire,” he says. “It was extremely exciting, to be honest.”
“I’d never been to Africa, I’d never investigated an epidemic, so I definitely did not qualify and in today’s world, I don’t think I would be allowed to do this.”
As Prof Piot recalls in his book, No Time to Lose, what followed were two adventure-filled but exhausting months, predominantly spent in the jungle some 600 miles from Zaire’s capital city, Kinshasa. An international team of scientists meticulously investigated the disease, which slowly petered out after killing 280 people......
