Wayne Marvin Meyers (August 28, 1924 – September 12, 2018)[1][2] was an American physician, microbiologist, chemist, humanitarian, and medical missionary.
In fact, the prime minister had been assassinated no more than two days before Meyers' arrival in the capital city of Usumbura.
[3] Medications were limited, but sulfones were available, and he was able to provide treatment for a great many people, and care for the physical disabilities of most of the leprosy patients.
The following year, 1962, he and his family moved to what was then Zaire (the Democratic Republic of the Congo), to work in Kivu in extreme eastern part of the country, near the base of the Ruwenzori Mountains.
Joseph Mobutu had seized power in a military coup and soon arrested, tortured, and eventually had the elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba killed.
It began south, around Albertville, and swept north, eventually to involve nearly half the country, on a line diagonally drawn between the Ubangi and the Shaba area.
Because of health reasons for one of their daughters, Meyers and his wife, Esther left the little jungle hospital just a couple of months before the rebels arrived and were not captured, however, all of their belongings and personal effects were lost.
So the American Leprosy Missions moved the family to the Bas-Congo (Lower Congo), about halfway between Matadi and Kinshasa.
All leprosy patients were eventually discharged from the leprosarium, and seen and treated in these outlying centers, which Meyers visited regularly by Land Rover or by airplane.
[3][6] In addition to leprosy, Meyers encountered many other diseases including some which would later become part of his great life work, buruli ulcer and streptocerciasis.
Meyers traveled extensively through the African region going to different mission stations, universities and other teaching centers in order to develop the leprosy service in the country.
[3] Specifically, David Ho and colleagues from the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York told a conference that using that sera from 1959 they identified a case of HIV infection to a man living in what was then the Belgian Congo.
At that time, he met Daniel H. Connor, who was then planning to go to Uganda on a project which Chapman H. Binford (Chair of the Infectious Disease Department) and Robert E. Stowell (Scientific Director of the AFIP) had arranged.
By the time he left there in 1973, he and other physicians were seeing hundreds of cases annually of African-type sleeping sickness caused by trypanosomes in the hospital.
There was a lot of material on other mycobacterial diseases, such as Buruli ulcer, (Mycobacterium ulcerans infections) which is relatively unknown by the medical profession in the US, but it is a major problem in many foci in Africa and other places such as Australia.
[3] In addition his work at the AFIP included work on the World Health Organization WHO Center for the Study of Filariasis developed in the Infectious Disease department primarily by Binford, and filarial diseases was one of the major collaborative efforts between Meyers, Ronald C. Neafie, and Aileen M.
[13] In the early 1990s Meyers began to focus more of his work on Mycobacterium ulcerans, the third most common mycobacterial infection of immunocompetent people, following tuberculosis and leprosy.
This tiny bacterium produces a toxin that causes deep, rapidly developing ulcers of the skin and destroys the subcutaneous fat.
In 1992 Meyers traveled with Marty to West Africa to establish relations with local physicians and government health officials to learn more about the extent of the disease in that part of the world while also there to gather data on leprosy in non-human primates.
He then worked closely with a Belgian scientist, Professor Françoise Portaels to further understand the pathogenesis of this terrible infectious disease.
Meyers remained active as a scientist and physician even in his final year of life, the last article he worked on with Portaels involving Buruli ulcer was published in January 2018.