A review of THE COMING PLAGUE: NEWLY EMERGING DISEASES IN A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE by Laurie Garrett, published in 1994. Chapter 5: Yambuku – EBOLA
On November 16, 1976 McCormick returned with startling news
News of Platt’s illness came to Yambuku on November 12, 1976 hitting the commission members very hard. Morale Plummeted and collective fear rose. By November 9, Sureau, having personally searched 21 villages, identified 136 fatal Ebola cases, and mapped the complex relationships of all the dead, recovered and well people in those villages, was ready to leave. Of all the foreigners flown into Zaire during the epidemic, Sureau had been at it longest. He was burned out, and both he and Johnson felt the epidemic was over. Sureau began his long journey home. But the mystery of Ebola was far from solved. On November 16, McCormick returned with startling news: “What we have here is two totally separate outbreaks. There is no relationship between what’s going on here and what’s happening in N’zara, except they both happen to be Ebola virus.” “There’s no way the Yambuku virus could get to N’zara or vice versa unless some infected person traveled those roads. And I can tell you, guys, my Land-Rover was the first vehicle on those so-called roads in months … maybe years.” McCormick’s theories were dismissed out of hand by most commission members. There was some as yet undiscovered link between the two epidemics. Joe stubbornly insisted, however, that despite what seemed coincidence on an unnaturally profound scale, the two epidemics were entirely separate events. He would not abandon that belief with the passage of time, and years later would provide irrefutable proof that Nature had, indeed, rolled an incredibly bizarre set of snakes eyes.
PART VII
The drunken pilots crashed the helicopter and everybody on board died
A few days after Joe’s return, Piot got a radio message from Johnson, telling him a Zairian Air Force helicopter would arrive shortly to bring him back to Bumba for a meeting with U.S. Embassy officials. The skies suddenly darkened and he could tell a storm was coming. Out of the blackened sky came the Puma helicopter and without shutting off its engines the pilot called out to Piot. When Piot asked the pilot about the safety of flying such a large cumbersome helicopter in a storm, he smelled the familiar scent of Zairian beer on the pilot’s answering breath. “To hell with it,” Piot said. “I’m not going to that meeting.” Two days later a somber Johnson radioed Piot with the bad news, telling him that the drunken pilots had crashed the helicopter and everybody on board had died. Piot listened in disbelief as Johnson went on to explain that the Zairian Air Force was holding Piot personally responsible for the deaths. “They’re saying you sabotaged the helicopter because you’re some kind of Belgian colonialist and they’re insisting you have to go out there, get those bodies and perform autopsies. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts on this one, Peter. You have to do it. The entire research effort could be shut down in an instant if the Zairian military tells Mobutu we’re a bunch of CIA agents or something.”
It would be several days before the women would learn that their husbands were alive
A detail of prisoners from the local jail worked all night under Piot’s directions making three coffins. The next day Piot and the prisoners were flown by bitterly angry Zairian Air Force pilots to a plantation on the edge of the jungle area in which the hunter had spotted the wreckage. With the prisoners in a line behind him hauling the coffins and supplies, Piot cut a path through the rain forest. They were joined by clusters of the curious, totaling over a hundred people. The wind first told them when they had reached their destination, for it carried the stench of three human bodies that had cooked for four sweltering days in the equatorial jungle. At the ghastly sight of the wreckage, all the prisoners screamed in horror and ran away. He looked at the villagers, at the bodies, and called out, “The shoes! The shoes! Whoever helps me gets the shoes!” Like so many other members of the International Commission, Piot was discovering that the relatively brief Yambuku experience was completely changing his life. Unbeknownst to the Piot and van Nieuwenhove, the Belgian government had informed Dina and Margarethe that “there had been a deadly helicopter crash involving Belgian members of the International Commission.” It would be several days before the women would learn that their husbands were alive.
With routine comes complacency, a lowering of both guard and fear
Since the ghastly incident with the Zairian helicopter, Piot was gaining a healthy respect for danger, among other things. But most of the other survey team members had settled into routines, staying in the more comfortable town of Bumba, driving their Land-Rovers out to the villages, and going house to house completing huge questionnaires on detailed information considered vital to understanding the epidemic. With routine comes complacency, a lowering of both guard and fear.