Ebola has been defeated. Vaccines and medical treatments have brought the deadly and terrifying disease under control, says Jean-Jacques Muyembe, the Congolese professor who first discovered the virus more than 40 years ago.
The 79-year-old virologist was speaking at a ceremony in the Democratic Republic of Congo's capital Kinshasa marking the arrival on the market of the"Ebanga" treatment, which was approved last December by the US Food and Drug Administration.Together with more effective clinical treatments, the availability of vaccines means the highly infectious haemorrhagic fever that once proved almost always fatal can now be contained.
Muyembe first came across the virus in 1976 as a field epidemiologist when he was called to the village of Yambuku in northern DRC, which was then called Zaire.He took a sample from a sick nun, sent it to Belgium, where microbiologist Peter Piot isolated the virus for the first time - and is widely and incorrectly credited as the man who"discovered" the disease.
Muyembe tried treating eight patients with transfusions of blood from someone who was recovering. Seven survived."Here we do the diagnosis," said the professor in his lab."It's very important in the field to know if a patient has Ebola."
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