‘Ebola is defeated’, announces professor who discovered virus

Kinshasa - Jean-Jacques Muyembe, 79, says vaccines and medical treatments have brought the deadly disease under control

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.

“For 40 years I have been a witness and a player in the fight against this terrifying and deadly disease and I can say today: it is defeated, it is preventable and curable,” Muyembe said.

“I’m the happiest of Congolese people.”

Ebanga, a human monoclonal antibody that prevents the virus from entering a cell and reduces the risk of dying, is “the Congolese molecule”, as US biologist Nancy Sullivan put it, having done research in America with Muyembe.

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.

A mysterious illness had just appeared.

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 miscredited as the man who “discovered” the disease.

The virus was named Ebola after a river close to Yambuku.

“At the time, I took samples with my bare hands, as blood was flowing”, Muyembe told AFP before the ceremony in his laboratory, equipped with gloves, a gown, boots and a protective cap.

After 1976, the disease plunged back into obscurity until 1995 when an epidemic of “red diarrhoea” erupted in Kikwit, a 400,000-strong city in western DRC.

DRC meanwhile experienced its 12th epidemic this year, which lasted three months.