The man who discovered Ebola

By some quirk of fate, just as news reached the papers that the Scottish nurse who had contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone was now recovered, the guest on that Radio 4 staple Desert Island Discs was the scientist who first identified the virus. This gave a programme that can seem rather outdated and superficial a whole new resonance, providing the back story to the news, adding that frisson of inquiry, of revelation. Did Professor Peter Piot, as a young researcher working at Antwerp’s Institute of Tropical Medicine almost 40 years ago, realise he was seeing something quite new and so dangerous? ‘It looked like war,’ he told Kirsty Young after giving us a vivid description of how the virus arrived at the lab in a shiny blue Thermos flask, ‘just like the kind you use for coffee’, brought by a Belgian pilot straight from Kinshasa, capital of what was then Zaire.

‘Was he wearing gloves?’ asked Young. ‘Of course,’ said Piot, who for the past four years has been director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That was not the problem. The flask contained a blood sample from a nun who had fallen sick while nursing others in the hospital she helped to run in an isolated community in Zaire where no attention was paid to the basic rules about reusing syringes, let alone the strict conditions necessitated by Ebola’s ferocious power. That’s probably why the virus was allowed to take hold, says Piot, after being caught originally by someone from an infected bat, who then passed on the illness at their funeral. Death rites in West Africa involve careful and communal washing of the body and much hugging as a way of saying farewell. It has been very hard to change these behaviours. Touching is part of everyday greeting in Africa; not to shake hands is thought rude.