In 1976, young Congolese doctor Jean-Jacques Muyembe was sent to a remote village to look into a mysterious illness and found himself confronting Ebola, a deadly virus the world did not yet know.
Just back in the Democratic Republic of Congo after studying in Belgium, he had been called to Yambuku where doctors initially thought they were dealing with typhoid or yellow fever.
He drew blood from a sick nun and sent the sample to Belgium where microbiologist Peter Piot would soon isolate the new virus, later named Ebola after a nearby river.
At the time, Muyembe had little sense of the danger he had exposed himself to.
"When I removed the needle, the blood kept flowing and my fingers were covered in it," he told AFP in Kinshasa.
