It Takes a Village

It Takes a Village

By Beth Marie Mole | June 1, 2013

Peter Piot got his first dose of global public-health work in Zaire more than 35 years ago, at the bedside of the world’s earliest Ebola patients. The scene was gruesome: patients oozed thick, dark blood from every opening and died atop the rusty springs of mattressless beds. The victims of the new, lethal virus had begun trickling into the country’s dilapidated rural clinics in September 1976. By October, Piot, a Belgian clinician who had co-identified the virus just weeks earlier, was bushwhacking through Zaire’s lush jungle and sordid politics to help stymie the outbreak. He had no experience in epidemiology and it was his first trip to the country—his first time seeing the poorly equipped clinics, with untrained staff, empty medicine cabinets, and filthy conditions.

In the months and years that followed, Piot forged lasting collaborations with local researchers and doctors in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as with international health experts. Together, when the HIV/AIDS epidemic hit the continent a few years later, they trained clinic staff, ensured that dirty needles weren’t reused—an issue that caused the first Ebola outbreak, Piot and his colleagues discovered—and helped bring new blood tests and equipment to hospitals. By 1990, the public-health laboratory they partnered with in the city of Lubumbashi had proper blood screenings and a fully functional clinical lab.

The Scientist - Speaking of Science

Speaking of Science

Volume 25 | Issue 3 | Page 18 | Date: 2011-03-01

Behavioural Ecology Research Group, Oxford

How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! How short his time! and consequently how poor will be his results, compared with those accumulated by Nature during whole geological periods! — Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species (1859)

Why them? Why is this species [the New Caledonian crow] on a small island in the Pacific able to not just use but to manufacture a variety of tools, and in a flexible rather than a rote or programmatic way? Why are they able to do at least as well as chimpanzees on experiments of cognition…?

— Russell Gray of the University of Aukland, as quoted by Natalie Angier in “Nurturing Nests Lift These Birds to a Higher Perch” (New York Times, Jan. 31, 2011)