Ebola has been defeated. According to Jean-Jacques Muyembe, the Congolese professor who first discovered the virus more than 40 years ago, vaccines and medical treatments brought the deadly disease under control.
While speaking at a ceremony in the Democratic Republic of Congo marking the arrival of the “Ebanga” treatment, Muyembe said that today, Ebola is “defeated, it is preventable and curable.”
Ebanga is a human monoclonal antibody that prevents the Ebola virus from entering a cell and reduces the risk of dying. The treatment was just approved last December by the US Food and Drug Administration.
The 79-year-old virologist first came across the virus in 1976 as a field epidemiologist when a mysterious illness appeared in the village of Yambuku in northern DRC.
Muyembe then took a sample from a sick nun and sent it to Belgium where microbiologist Peter Piot isolated the virus for the first time.
“At the time, I took samples with my bare hands, as blood was flowing”, Muyembe told AFP before the ceremony.
Ebola has killed more than 15,000 people since it first appeared.
The biggest epidemic hit Western Africa between 2013 and 2016, killing 11,000 people. DRC meanwhile experienced its 12th epidemic this year, which lasted three months.
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