According to Jean-Jacques Muyembe, the Congolese scientist who originally discovered the virus more than 40 years ago, Ebola virus has been eradicated, vaccines and medical therapies have brought the deadly and horrific sickness under control.
The 79-year-old virologist was speaking at a ceremony in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, to commemorate the entry on the market of the “Ebanga” medication, which was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last December.
The availability of vaccines, combined with increasingly effective clinical treatments, means that the extremely contagious haemorrhagic fever, which was once nearly always fatal, can now be controlled.
“I’ve been a witness and a plagiarist for 40 years.
“I have been a witness and a participant in the struggle against this frightening and deadly disease for 40 years, and I can now state that it has been defeated, that it is preventive, and that it is curable,” Muyembe added.
“I am the happiest of the Congolese.”
Ebanga, a human monoclonal antibody that inhibits the virus from entering a cell and lessens the chance of death, has been dubbed “the Congolese molecule” by Nancy Sullivan, a US biologist who worked with Muyembe on research in the United States.
