COMMUNITY COLLABORATION: Rutgers University’s Pam McElwee (front right) maps out local resources with the indigenous Mnong people of the Dak Lak province in Vietnam to help inform their decisions about land and water use.COURTESY OF PAM MCELWEE
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.
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