Muyembe was part of the research team which investigated the first known outbreak of the Ebola virus in 1976.
A Congolese microbiologist, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, has warned that more pandemics deadlier than COVID-19 are coming to threaten humanity.
Muyembe was part of the research team which investigated the first known outbreak of the Ebola virus in 1976.
The microbiologist expressed fear that the world faces an unknown number of new and potentially fatal viruses emerging from Africa's tropical rainforests.
"We are now in a world where new pathogens will come out. And that's what constitutes a threat for humanity," he told CNN.
According to him, future pandemics could be more apocalyptic than COVID-19.
Researchers are now working to combat the threat of so-called 'Disease X' - a pathogen that could sweep the world as fast as COVID-19 but with Ebola's shocking fatality rate, the Sun UK reported.
As a young researcher, Muyembe took blood samples from victims of the then-unknown disease that killed nine out of 10 patients.
Those samples were sent from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to scientists around the world who discovered a worm-shaped virus in patients' blood later named after the river Ebola.
It's believed the disease - which causes vomiting and horrific internal bleeding - first spread to humans from an animal possibly a fruit bat.
He believes humans encroaching into the wild hugely increases the risk of new pandemics.
Muyembe now runs the Institut National de Recherche Biomédicale in Kinshasa, capital of the DRC, and warns more zoonotic illnesses - where pathogens jump between animals and humans - are coming.
"If you go in the forest, you will change the ecology, and insects and rats will leave this place and come to the villages. So, this is the transmission of the virus, of the new pathogens," he said.