The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2020 105 seriousness of the emergency, cooper- ated in organizing an international team of doctors to undertake in-country research. We at the embassy were deeply involved, helping to bring over from Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention several prominent experts in tropical diseases to play a courageous, leading role in the research effort. No sooner in the country they were off to Yambuku for the first of repeated visits. Meanwhile, the toll of victims was rapidly rising: Within a few weeks, 280 of 318 people infected had died. In his post-operation report, Dr. Joel Breman, a CDC epidemiologist who went to Yambuku, called Ebola “the scariest epidemic of my entire career, and pos- sibly of the last century.” The goal was quickly to identify and isolate the virus, thus permitting the development of an antidote that would prevent the epidemic from spreading throughout the country and perhaps the world. That goal was eventually achieved. Understandably, the near panic that was gripping Kinshasa included the foreign community. In an effort to inform and, hopefully, calmmembers of my staff, I invited one of the CDC experts, Dr. Karl Johnson, to brief our embassy coun- try team following his initial visit to the infected area. Meeting first with me in my office, he grimly compared Ebola to The Andromeda Strain , the shocking novel about a deadly extraterrestrial disease. We then walked into the embassy’s conference room, where we found most of the staff had already seated themselves as far away as they could from the chair reserved for the doctor. Their obvious concern not to get too close to him was readily heightened by seeing his arms riddled with what looked like severe sores and rashes. He smiled and said not to worry: We were only looking at harm- less mosquito bites—not at any symp- toms of Ebola. We all laughed, although a tad nervously. If our American doctors were brave in trying to solve this dangerous medical mystery, so, too, was one of our Peace Corps evacuees, a young public health volunteer. Although prohibited from resuming his work and life in Yambuku, he had gotten to know the region well and offered to accompany the doctors on one of their first trips there. Our Peace Corps director, with my somewhat reluc- tant concurrence, agreed. One can imagine our second thoughts when, only a few days after the volun- teer’s arrival in Yambuku, we received word that he had developed symptoms of Ebola and required immediate evacua- tion. Placed in a U.S.-supplied “aircraft transit isolator”—a head-to-foot con- traption that looked like a custom-made cell—he was flown back to Kinshasa in a Zairian military plane for transfer to a U.S. Air Force C-141 that, with a complete medical team aboard, would fly him to a hospital in South Africa. But nothing is ever easy in Africa. The victim had to wait some six hours, lying in his isolator in the back of a truck in the corner of a stifling airport hangar far from other people, while the C-141 made its way across the continent from Madrid. Our embassy doctor managed to get water to him, and a portable fan was set up to counter the wilting midday heat. Then, once safely in Air Force hands, the patient had to endure an unusually long and turbulent flight. It was a frightening life-and-death mission, and we were all immensely relieved to get word from South Africa a few days later that it was not, after all, the deadly Ebola virus. I was equally proud of probably the only government in the world that would go to such an extraordi- nary extent to safeguard the life of one of its young employees. Little did I guess how often Ebola would recur in Africa after my time there, including the widespread 2012-2015 out- break in several West African countries and, more recently, in remote regions of the Congo and neighboring states. At the same time, for a variety of reasons, including the eventual development of vaccines, Ebola has failed to go global like today’s COVID-19. If little else, the 1976 scare served to underscore the critical importance of public health as an issue of foreign policy. n In 1976 Sister Marietta walks among the graves of her colleagues who perished during the Zaire Ebola outbreak of August that year. The Flemish nuns and the African staff of a mission hospital in Yambuku, Zaire, treated the first known patient of Ebola hemorrhagic fever. The virus traveled quickly, and a large number of the mission members and patients died that fall. CDC/LYLECONRAD