Peter Piot on the current Ebola epidemic

One of the researchers who unearthed the Ebola virus in 1976 was Belgian-born Professor Peter Piot, who is currently the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. As well as being a renowned scientist, he is also a former diplomat, having served as Under Secretary-General at the United Nations from 1994 to 2008.

When Piot was in his last year at medical school in the Belgian city of Ghent, some of the professors there told him there was no future in specializing in infectious diseases because of the widespread availability of antibiotics and vaccines.

But the young Piot was fascinated by microbes and passionate about how these tiny miscroscopic organisms can have such a huge impact on human beings. So he decided to disregard the advice - a decision that led to him becoming one of the world's foremost experts on Ebola.

A couple of years after graduating from medical school, he trained in microbiology at the School of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. "One day, we got a thermos with some vials with blood from a dead nun in a country then called Zaire [now Democratic Republic of Congo] and it was from someone who had died from what was thought to be yellow fever," Piot said.

From that vial, Piot and his colleagues isolated what is now known as the Ebola virus, one of the most lethal viruses ever discovered. "And so I ended up in the middle of Africa in Zaire, and that was my entry with a big bang into the world of global health which didn't even exist at that time," Piot said.

Nearly four decades have passed since the discovery of the Ebola virus. But with the announcement by the United Nations that the current outbreak in several West African countries represents a global threat to peace and security, Piot finds himself thrown once again into the front line of the war against the killer virus. He admits to having been taken by surprise by the large scale of the current outbreak, which is the 25th in the whole of Africa.

"All previous epidemics were quite limited in time and place, generally affecting small villages or small towns, and would die out after fairly classic isolation and quarantine - but in this case it's different," he said.

Piot has consistently criticized the slow response by national and international partners to calls for help to bring the outbreak under control.

"Let’s not forget that in Liberia there's about one doctor for every 100,000 people and in the meantime several of them have died from Ebola," he commented.

The United Nations has now created the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER). Advance teams arrived in West Africa on Monday, September 22.

In Germany, Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said she was ovewhelmed by the response to her call for members of the armed forces, the Bundeswehr, to volunteer to help in the fight against Ebola. By Wednesday, there had been 2,000 responses from both troops and civilian staff.

According to Piot, the current Ebola outbreak should be the last one in which whole communities are isolated and quarantined. He says what is needed are stockpiles of vaccines and drugs in regions where the virus might resurface so that the response can be immediate.

On Wednesday he was quoted by the German news agency dpa as saying that he was afraid that the virus could spread beyond Africa. One of the many Indians living in West Africa could become infected, travel back home to India during the incubation period and there infect relatives and possibly also medical staff who may not be wearing the necessary protective clothing.