SA laboratory on frontline of the Ebola fight

SOUTH African professor Janusz Paweska hesitates for a moment as he describes his work trip to the heart of the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone.

“Obviously we had to touch the tubes,” he says. “I wonder if I should tell you but I opened them with my hands – I opened 1 400 tubes of blood with my hands.”

He used gloves, three pairs of them. But when handling a disease that has so far killed more than 5 000 people in West Africa, according to the World Health Organisation, there’s a lot of trust put in those gloves.

Paweska heads the special pathogens unit at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa, one of only two top tier – level four – biosafety labs on the continent.

Paweska and his Johannesburg colleagues are conducting experiments on bats and how the Ebola virus replicates in the animals’ blood and tissues without killing them.

It’s the kind of work that could have a real impact in the development of an antiviral drug or vaccine. But while the Johannesburg laboratory cannot prevent an Ebola outbreak, it can diagnose and recognise one – an essential skill crucially missing from the very countries currently battling the disease.

Now back in Freetown with his team, Paweska said the operation was the biggest the institute had ever taken on.

Many volunteered, but only about four or five have actually signed up to help in the next six months.

Some researchers’ families simply refused to let them make the trip. — AFP