Nekaj odlomkov iz izjemno zanimivega intervjuja z odkriteljem virusa ebole: Interview with Peter Piot Discoverer of the Ebola Virus – SPIEGEL ONLINE
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. … 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. …
When we were just about able to begin examining the virus under an electron microscope, the World Health Organization instructed us to send all of our samples to a high security lab in England. But my boss at the time wanted to bring our work to conclusion no matter what. He grabbed a vial containing virus material to examine it, but his hand was shaking and he dropped it on a colleague’s foot! The vial shattered. My only thought was: “Oh shit!” …
When the Belgian government decided to send someone, I volunteered immediately. I was 27 and felt a bit like my childhood hero Tintin. And I have to admit, I was intoxicated by the chance to track down something totally new. … Of course it was clear to us that we were dealing with one of the deadliest infectious diseases the world had ever seen — and we had no idea that it was transmitted via bodily fluids! It could also have been mosquitoes. We wore protective suits and latex gloves and I even borrowed a pair of motorcycle goggles to cover my eyes. …
In their hospital, they regularly gave pregnant women vitamin injections using unsterilized needles. By doing so, they infected many young women in Yambuku with the Ebola virus. We told the nuns about the terrible mistake they had made, but looking back I would say that we were much too careful in our choice of words. Clinics that failed to observe this and other rules of hygiene functioned as catalysts in all additional Ebola outbreaks. …
I think it is what people call a perfect storm: when every individual circumstance is a bit worse than normal and they then combine to create a disaster. And with this epidemic, there were many factors that were disadvantageous from the very beginning. Some of the countries involved were just emerging from terrible civil wars, many of their doctors had fled and their healthcare systems had collapsed. …
Of course we are a long way away from declaring victory over bacteria and viruses. HIV is still here; in London alone, five gay men become infected daily. An increasing number of bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. And I can still see the Ebola patients in Yambuku how they died in their shacks and we couldn’t do anything except let them die. In principle, it’s still the same today. That is very depressing. But it also provides me with a strong motivation to do something. I love life. And that is why I am doing everything I can to convince the powerful in this world to finally send sufficient help to West Africa. Now!
Dodatek: Ebola: how did a Spanish nurse become infected with virus in high containment unit?
Let’s get two things straight: This virus is highly infectious – we only need a very small number of virus particles, maybe as few as one, to initiate an infection. But, unlike measles, the virus isn’t very contagious. In other words, it doesn’t spread from person to person very easily. On the scale used to measure how likely a virus is to transmit: for every 10 people infected with Ebola they will pass their virus on to a further 17 people. These figures are relatively modest, but the rate of transmission is still high enough to produce the exponential growth in cases that we are seeing in Western Africa today, and why some think that the number of cases might eventually grow to more than 1.5 million.
