By the time the epidemic abated, 317 people had been infected and 245 had died. It was only in May, after the simmering outbreak had flared into something disastrous, after wards had filled with screams and vomit, after graves had filled with bodies, after Muyembe had arrived on the scene and again sent samples abroad for testing, that everyone realized Ebola was back. In Kikongo, the predominant local dialect, his surname means “blood.” He checked into Kikwit General Hospital in January and died from what doctors took to be shigellosis-a diarrheal disease caused by bacteria. The first victim was 35-year-old Gaspard Menga, who worked in the surrounding forest raising crops and making charcoal. In 1995, it reemerged in Kikwit, about 500 miles to the southwest. And, having been discovered, it largely vanished for almost 20 years. It took the name Ebola from a river near Yambuku. From those samples, which were shipped to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, scientists identified the virus.
Jean-Jacques Muyembe, then the country’s only virologist, collected blood samples from some of the first patients and carried them back to Kinshasa in delicate test tubes, which bounced on his lap as he trundled down undulating roads. The Congo-and the world- first learned about Ebola in 1976, when a mystery illness emerged in the northern village of Yambuku. Read: The dos and don’ts of ‘social distancing’ Until Ebola, “no one had ever taken bodies and thrown them together like sacks of manioc,” Mikolo tells me. Eventually, of necessity, they were eliminated entirely. These intense rituals of love and community were corrupted by Ebola, which harnessed them to spread through entire families. They should be dressed, caressed, kissed, and embraced. In the Congo, when people die, their bodies are meant to be cleaned by their families. As he looks at the resting place of those who didn’t, his solemn demeanor cracks a bit. Mikolo survived his own encounter with Ebola in 1995.
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To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.Įmery Mikolo, a 55-year-old Congolese man with a wide, angular face, walks with me. The ordeal that Kikwit suffered has been crowded out by the continual eruption of deadly diseases elsewhere in the Congo, and around the globe. The sign is partly obscured by overgrown grass, just as the memory itself has been occluded by time. Nearby, a large blue sign says in memory of the victims of the ebola epidemic in may 1995. The only shade is cast by two lines of trees, which mark the edges of a site where more than 200 people are buried, their bodies piled into three mass graves, each about 15 feet wide and 70 feet long. As I walk, desiccated shrubs crunch underfoot and butterflies flit past. So, too, the city.īy late morning, I am away from the bustle, on a quiet, exposed hilltop some five miles down a pothole-ridden road. The air starts to heat up, its molecules vibrating with absorbed energy. Dust-sprayed jeeps and motorcycles zoom eastward toward the town’s bustling markets or westward toward Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital city. Image above: Workers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s biocontainment unit practicing procedural safety on a mannequinĪ t 6 o’clock in the morning, shortly after the sun spills over the horizon, the city of Kikwit doesn’t so much wake up as ignite.
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