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
Dr. William Close immediately contacted the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta
Dr. William Close, in Wyoming at the time, had lived sixteen years in Kinshasa, serving as personal physician to President Mobutu Sese Seko and directing a nongovernmental medical development group called Coopération Médicale Belge. Dr. Ngwété, Zaire’s Minister of Health, called to ask Close to notify American authorities, requesting assistance. Close immediately contacted the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, appraising the agency of the situation and formally requesting laboratory support to determine the cause of the Yambuku outbreak.
Either dead or too sick to continue tending patients
Back at the mission, more of the hospital staff contracted the disease. Now ten of the seventeen employees were either dead or too sick to continue tending patients. Following Muyembe’s parting recommendations, Sister Genoveva closed the hospital to all but the remaining dying victims of the mysterious disease. Sister Romana and Father Lootens died on October 2 1976 and the surviving Belgian missionaries were in such despair and terror that a visiting team of Kinshasa scientists found the group virtually paralyzed by anxiety.
Transport of goods and people in and out of the area came to a full stop
At Minister Ngwété’s request, a team of three medical experts had been assembled and flown to Bumba by the Zairian Air Force. From there they drove to Yambuku. Close explained the crisis to President Mobutu, who expressed concern about containing the epidemic, and put his personal Hercules C-130 transport jet at the disposal of the medical effort. He also ordered the entire Bumba Zone placed under strict isolation. All roadways, waterways, and airfields in the region were placed under martial law, and the transport of goods and people in and out of the area came to a full stop within a week. Close helped gather medical supplies, rudimentary lab equipment, and other hospital essentials from warehouses and hospitals around Kinshasa, and these were loaded aboard Mobutu’s jet and flown to Bumba.
The Sudanese accounts bore a remarkable resemblance to those from Yambuku
At about the same time, Paul Brès received word that another strange epidemic was unfolding in a town called Maridi in the grasslands of southern Sudan. Brès and other experts in the virus branch of WHO thought – from their Geneva vantage point – that the Sudanese accounts bore a remarkable resemblance to those from Yambuku. He urged Khartoum to immediately send blood and tissue samples from Maridi patients.
It was no simple matter for a doctor
It was no simple matter for a doctor in Khartoum to make his way to Sudan’s southernmost provinces, to gather blood samples, store the precious fluids in containers that would protect their contents from the intense desert heat, and make his way back to Khartoum. The people in the three most southerly provinces lived and believed as they had since before the Nubians were enslaved by Egypt’s Pharaohs. Speaking a variety of ancient Bantu languages, the southerners lived in small, temporary villages, were often nomadic, had a high rate of illiteracy, and could not be expected to be found in any particular locale at any specific time. In addition to the usual – and monumental – logistic obstacles to such a trek, whoever went faced the even more towering blockade of politics. In 1969 Sudan had a military coup d’état.
Their greatest fear was that the epidemics of Yambuku and Maridi were one and the same
Brès and other Geneva officials insisted on pushing past the political obstacles to discover what was going on in Maridi. Their greatest fear was that the epidemics of Yambuku and Maridi were one and the same, representing a vast super-lethal disaster spanning an area of about 1,000 square miles in at least two nations. Blood samples, collected in Maridi and shipped over several days’ time to Khartoum, finally reached Geneva. They were in poor condition, but WHO immediately sent them on for analysis in laboratories in the United States and the U.K.