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79-year-old Jean-Jacques Muyembe said that vaccines and medications have brought this deadly disease under control.
Ebola has been defeated. Congolese professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe, who first discovered the virus more than 40 years ago, said that vaccines and medical treatments have brought this deadly and terrible disease under control.
The 79-year-old virologist delivered a speech at a ceremony in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, marking the launch of the “Ebanga” therapy, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December last year.
Coupled with more effective clinical treatments, the availability of vaccines means that highly infectious hemorrhagic fever that once proved almost always fatal can now be controlled.
“For 40 years, I have been a witness and participant in the fight against this terrible and deadly disease, and today I can say: it has been defeated, it is preventable and curable,” Muyembe said.
“I am the happiest person among the Congolese.”
Ebanga is a human monoclonal antibody that prevents viruses from entering cells and reduces the risk of death. It is a “Congo molecule”, just like the research conducted by American biologist Nancy Sullivan and Muyembe in the United States.
Muyembe first came into contact with the virus in 1976 as a field epidemiologist, when he was called to the village of Yambuku in the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was then called Zaire.
A mysterious disease has just emerged.
He took a sample from a sick nun and sent it to Belgium, where the microbiologist Peter Piot first isolated the virus-and was widely mistaken for the person who “discovered” the disease.
The virus was named Ebola after a river near Yambuku.
Before the ceremony, Muyembe told AFP in his laboratory: “At that time, I collected samples with my bare hands.” He was wearing gloves, a robe, boots and a protective cap.
After 1976, the disease became obscured again, until the outbreak of the “red diarrhea” epidemic in Kikwete, a city of 400,000 people in the western Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 1995.
Muyembe tried to treat 8 patients with blood transfusions from people who are recovering. Seven people survived.
This gave him the idea of Ebanga, and finally conducted the first test in 2018.
“We are doing diagnosis here,” the professor said in his laboratory. “It is very important in this field to know whether a patient has Ebola.”
If the disease breaks out again, “we will interrupt the chain of transmission, vaccinate everyone around the positive case, and treat those who are sick,” he said.
“If the outbreak is announced in time, it may end within a week,” added the virologist who is in charge of the National Institute of Biomedical Research in the Democratic Republic of Congo and coordinates the country’s fight against Covid-19.
Since its emergence, Ebola has caused more than 15,000 deaths.
The main symptoms are fever, vomiting, bleeding and diarrhea.
The biggest epidemic hit West Africa between 2013 and 2016, killing 11,000 people.
At the same time, the Democratic Republic of Congo experienced its 12th outbreak this year, which lasted for three months.
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