In 1976, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, a young Congolese epidemiologist, was sent to investigate a mysterious disease that had erupted in the rainforest around a Catholic mission in what was then Zaire. He got to the remote village of Yambuku, not far from the Ebola river, to find a scene of terror as one person after another succumbed to fever, bleeding and death.
Muyembe, the son of farmers who had miraculously earned himself a PhD in virology after a Jesuit schooling, recalls finding the village deserted “as if nobody lived there”. Most of the nurses in the mission hospital had contracted the strange disease and died. All the patients had fled save for one mother and child. The child died that night.
In the morning, villagers flocked to the hospital, having heard that Muyembe and another doctor had come from Kinshasa, the distant capital, with medicine. Muyembe noticed, when he took blood samples, that puncture wounds bled profusely. He used a steel rod to collect tissue from the liver of two corpses; again there was an abnormal gushing of blood.