Scientist who discovered Ebola calls rising viral pandemic an ‘unimaginable catastrophe’
by: J. D. Heyes
NaturalNews.com
Sunday, October 12, 2014
The scientist who discovered the Ebola virus in 1976 after a pilot brought him a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had mysteriously fallen ill in Zaire says the disease has pandemic potential and he now fears that the world is on the edge of an “unimaginable catastrophe.”
In an interview with Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, the scientist, Peter Piot, who was a researcher in a lab in Antwerp when he made his discovery, discussed a number of things related to his discovery, recalling the details with remarkable clarity:
I still remember exactly. One day in September, a pilot from Sabena Airlines brought us a shiny blue Thermos and a letter from a doctor in Kinshasa in what was then Zaire. In the Thermos, he wrote, there was a blood sample from a Belgian nun who had recently fallen ill from a mysterious sickness in Yambuku, a remote village in the northern part of the country. He asked us to test the sample for yellow fever.
When asked how he and his fellow researchers protected themselves from what is a highly contagious disease, Piot said at the time they “had no idea how dangerous” it was. Further, he said there were, at the time, no high-security labs for such work in Belgium.
“We just wore our white lab coats and protective gloves,” he said. “When we opened the Thermos, the ice inside had largely melted and one of the vials had broken. Blood and glass shards were floating in the ice water. We fished the other, intact, test tube out of the slop and began examining the blood for pathogens, using the methods that were standard at the time.”
‘I thought I was infected’
The Rest…HERE
