Interview with Ebola Discoverer Peter Piot: 'It Is What People Call a Perfect Storm'

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-peter-piot-discoverer-of-the-ebola-virus-a-993111.html



Almost four decades ago, Peter Piot was part of the team that discovered the Ebola virus. In a SPIEGEL interview, he describes how the disease was isolated and explains why the current outbreak is different than any that have come before.

Interview with Ebola Discoverer Peter Piot: 'It Is What People Call a Perfect Storm'
Interview Conducted by Rafaela von Bredow and Veronika Hackenbroch
September 26, 2014 – 05:56 PM

SPIEGEL: Professor Piot, as a young scientist in Antwerp, you were part of the team that discovered the Ebola virus in 1976. How did it happen?

Piot: I still remember exactly: One day in September, a pilot from Sabena Airlines brought us a shiny blue thermos and a letter from a doctor in Kinshasa in what was then Zaire. In the thermos, he wrote, there was a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had recently fallen ill from a mysterious sickness in Yambuku, a remote village in the northern part of the country. He asked us to test the sample for yellow fever.

SPIEGEL: These days, Ebola may only be researched in high security laboratories. How did you protect yourself back then?

Piot: We had no idea how dangerous the virus we were dealing with was. And there were no high security labs in Belgium back then. We just wore our white lab coats and protective gloves. When we opened the thermos, the ice inside had largely melted and one of the vials had broken. Blood and glass shards were floating in the ice water. We fished the other, intact test tube out of the slop and began examining the blood for pathogens using the methods that were standard at the time.

[longship]

1. A damned good interview.

Hearty DURec!

[Adsos Letter]

2. As longship said, an excellent interview.

Piot: "...a mutation that would allow Ebola patients to live a couple of weeks longer is certainly possible and would be advantageous for the virus. But that would allow Ebola patients to infect many, many more people than is currently the case."

This is one of the statements that really jumped out at me. With all of the fears raised about Ebola mutating, and possibly becoming airborne (a scenario Dr. Piot discounts) I had not heard this scenario presented.

We in the West need to be putting as much effort and attention on combatting this scourge as we are on any of the military operations being carried on around the world.