Jean-Jacques Muyembe is not your run of the mill medical doctor. And he is unlike any White Coat wearing Scientist. He is known as The Ebola Hunter, in a similar manner like the Hurricane Hunters of North America. His enthusiasm at uprooting the Ebola Virus became a sort of an obsession such that he dedicated 43 years of his career towards finding solution to the ravaging Ebola Virus since 1976 when the Virus was first discovered in his native Congo Democratic Republic (DRC). His activities in the field of virology have earned him a lot of accolades both within Africa and outside the continent.
The year 2015 turned out to be a big turning point for a man who has spent all his life as a medical doctor and also as a career virologist with the caliber of awards and prizes he won that year. First, he won the Christophe Mérieux Prize to study further research in the Congo. Same year he was awarded the Royal Society Africa Prize “for his seminal work on viral hemorrhagic fevers which includes Ebola. That study according to scientists who have been working in the field of viral hemorrhagic fevers and virology generated the foundation for a deeper understanding of the epidemiology, clinical manifestations and control of outbreaks of these viral infections, mostly in Africa. In same 2015, Dr. Muyembe was equally awarded with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2015 International Symposium on Filoviruses. And in 2018 he was named as one of Nature’s Top 10 Personalities in the world.
Dr. Muyembe had a very humble background. Growing up is a poor rural community where it took the intervention of the Jesuits to see him through school because his parents could not foot for his education bills from their meager resources. His contributions to the field of medicine could be described as one of the most inspiring stories on giving back to humanity, from someone whose life was greatly impacted by humanity.
It is but a twist of fate that Ebola, which was first discovered in 1976 near the Ebola River in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is also going to face its demise through the instrumentation of the genius of a man from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). A man whose entire life could be said to have revolved round finding a cure to the disease as scientists all over the world have been at a loss as to where Ebola virus comes from. However, based on the nature of similar viruses, they believe the virus is animal-borne, with bats being the most likely source. The bats carrying the virus can transmit it to other animals, like apes, monkeys, duikers and humans.
Of all the health epidemics that have hit the African continent, none was as feared and as immediately devastating as the Ebola Virus. Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), a rare and deadly disease most commonly affecting people and nonhuman primates (monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees) is caused by an infection with a group of viruses within the genus Ebolavirus. But of the six known Ebolavirus, only four (Ebola, Sudan, Taï Forest, and Bundibugyo viruses) are known to cause disease in people. Reston virus is known to cause disease in nonhuman primates and pigs, but not in people. It is unknown if Bombali virus, which was recently identified in bats, causes disease in either animals or people.
Growing up in Bandundu Province of Congo and was educated by the Jesuits. Dr. Muyembe studied medicine at the Lovanium University in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where he became interested in microbiology and graduated in 1962. In his quest for more knowledge in the field of Virology, he earned a PhD in virology at the University of Leuven in Belgium, working on viral infections with mouse models. Unlike many highly educated Africans of that era, he returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1973 and worked in outbreak control. In 1974 there was a cholera outbreak in Matadi, which was the first crisis that Muyembe worked on. From then on, his enthusiasm, and passion was kindled, and he has never looked back.
He was appointed the Dean of the University of KinshasaMedical School in 1978. In 1981 Muyembe joined the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal, working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the ebola and marburg virus. In 1998 he was made the Director of the Democratic Republic of the Congo National Institute for Biomedical Research. He has acted as an adviser to the World Health Organization Emergency Committee on ebola. Here he leads 15 researchers studying sleeping sickness, bas-Congo virus and the ebola. He has advised political leadership in West Africa.
His first contact with the Ebola Virus was at a Belgian hospital in Yambuku in 1979, using very unconventional means, he used a long steel rod to collect liver biopsies from three nuns who had died of the Virus, unfortunately, the findings from that initial experimentation turned inconclusive, but Dr. Muyembe was undeterred. It was as if the first contract to seal the fate of the Ebola Virus was signed that day.
As legendary Bob Marley sang, “he who fights and run away, lives to fight another day”, that encounter with the Ebola Virus was a turning point for Dr. Muyembe, he became the first scientist in the world to come into contact with the virus and survive. As some of his friends joked, Ebola Virus biggest mistake was its failure to kill Dr. Muyembe, because Muyembe would grow to becomes a menace to the Virus, but that was after the Virus had taken a huge toll on Africa, wrecking havocs from central to the tip of west Africa, bringing economies to its knees while wiping out several villages.
Without Dr. Muyembe’s intervention, the world would not have known what it knows about Ebola Virus when it knew it, because it was the blood samples he collected from a sick nurse that was later sent for analysis at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, and then to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where Peter Piot discovered Ebola Virus as a new filoviridae.
Before Dr. Muyembe’s invention ZMapp was the available drugs used during the massive Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. But with this development, it has been dropped along with Remdesivir after two monoclonal antibodies, which block the virus, had substantially more effect. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases which co-sponsored the trial of the drugs said that all Ebola treatment units will now use the two monoclonal antibody drugs.
Declaring the death of the Ebola Virus ability to inflict such mass health scare again, Jean-Jacques Muyembe enthused that “from now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is incurable.” Dr Muyembe, who is the director general of the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale in DRC, which has overseen the trial, added that “these advances will help save thousands of lives.” He noted that “now that 90% of their patients can go into the treatment centre and come out completely cured, they will start believing it and building trust in the population and community”.
“This trial – the first-ever multi-drug randomised trial for Ebola – has happened despite such highly complex and challenging circumstance,” said Dr Jeremy Farrar, the director of Wellcome and the co-chair of the WHO Ebola therapeutics group. “A long-running outbreak like this takes a terrible toll on the communities affected and it is a sign of just how difficult this epidemic has been to control that there have already been enough patients treated to tell us more about the efficacy of these four drugs.”
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry.