How Ebola was discovered
With health officials around the world scrambling to stop the Ebola outbreak, it's worth taking a look back at how the deadly virus was first discovered.
In 1976, Peter Piot, then a 27-year-old microbiology student in Belgium, was studying infectious diseases when the lab he was working in received a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had died in Zaire.
"It came with a question mark, 'Yellow fever or not?'" Piot told the Wall Street Journal. "So we isolated the virus and to our big surprise, when we looked at the virus under our electron microscope, it was something completely different than what we had expected."
Piot sent the sample to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which confirmed it was indeed a new virus.
Piot and his colleagues then traveled to Zaire to study what he called "an epidemic of unknown origin and transmission."
"It was really frightening," Piot said. "You ask, 'Is this transmitted by mosquitoes? By food? By water?' ... you try to see, 'What is the pattern?'"
Those who died from the virus, the team discovered, were mostly pregnant women in their 20s and 30s who had been to the same antenatal clinic.
"It turned out that nearly everybody received an injection," Piot said. "The problem was that there were only five syringes and needles."
Those syringes and needles were reused over and over again, spreading the virus.
Piot, now director and professor of global health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says he is shocked at the scale of the current outbreak — and fears that the isolation and contact tracing utilized by health workers won't be able to contain it.
According to the World Health Organization, there have been 9,216 reported cases of Ebola in seven nations since the outbreak began in West Africa, and 4,555 deaths associated with the disease.
“Something that is easy to control got completely out of hand," Piot told London's Guardian newspaper earlier this week. "It may be that we have to wait for a vaccine to stop the epidemic."
