SAN FRANCISCO — Peter Piot is a world renowned microbiologist, but only so much progress can be made within the laboratory, the former UNAIDS executive director told Devex.
In 1976, a patient died of a mysterious illness at Yambuku Mission Hospital in Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A month after patient zero was hospitalized, and after several dozen patients developed hemorrhagic fevers, blood samples from a nun who died were sent to the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium.
Piot, then a 27-year-old junior researcher, was part of a larger team of scientists that would go on to discover that this was a new virus: Ebola.