Hello, welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service.

We are taking you back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1970s, then known as Zaire.

Around 300 people died during the first documented outbreak of Ebola virus.

In 2009, Claire Bose spoke to Dr. Jean-Jacques Miembay and Dr. David Heyman,

who worked to bring the outbreak under control.

It's 1976 and at a small Belgian missionary hospital in a village in northern Zaire,

people are dying from an unknown disease with horrific symptoms.

The affliction is characterized by a high temperature around 39 degrees centigrade,

frequent vomiting of black-digested blood but of red blood in a few cases.

Diereal emissions initially sprinkle with blood with only red blood near death.

Prostration with heaviness in the joints, rapid evolution towards death after a period of about three days.

This first medical report inspired the Ministry of Health to send Dr. Jean-Jacques Miembay,

a professor of microbiology at the University of Zaire, to the village of Yambuku.

He arrived at the hospital at night. There was nobody there.

Most of the staff and the patients had either fled or died.

No patient in the hospital except one young patient with a symptom of the disease.

So we spent the night there and in the morning I went to a house there and I saw one of the nurse was dead

and so I took some biopsies.

And after that, when people heard that the physician from the center of government,

from Kinchasa, arrived in the mission with medicine and so on,

they started to come to the hospital and so it was a lot of patients coming in the hospital.

So a huge number of patients lining up waiting to see you.

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