Muller up close and personal with Ebola

Marblehead native Peter Muller witnessed the Ebola virus’ toll on human lives up close for more than four weeks last summer and fall, and the freelance photographer is headed back to Africa next month to continue documenting the disease.”Ebola is scarier from a distance: Once you have an understanding of it, you can minimize the risks,” Muller said.The 32-year-old son of veteran North Shore photographer Paula Muller is currently on assignment for National Geographic. He was in the first wave of journalists from around the world to fly into West Africa and chronicle Ebola’s deadly spread from Guinea into the neighboring nations of Sierra Leone and Liberia.”The areas where the infection started are very remote and forested. It crept out from there to the towns,” Muller said.He was one of two journalists staying in a luxury hotel in Freetown – Sierra Leone’s capital – in August as the country’s overburdened government and medical workers grappled with treating Ebola patients and stopping the virus’ spread.”It was a ghost town – very creepy. We wondered, ?Are we going to be consumed by this virus?'” he recalled.The veteran international photographer has worked for a news agency reporting in the center of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and covered French military action against terror organization al-Qaida in Africa.A self-described “kid you couldn’t turn your back on,” Muller graduated Marblehead High School and toted his mother’s camera bag on the way to her assignments, including photographing for The Item.He “begged” his way into American University where he studied history and international peace and conflict before going abroad.”My personality has always been inquisitive: Journalism is an excuse to check things out,” he said.Muller’s father, Norman, lives in New Jersey, and he has a sister, Irene. Muller and his wife, Jehan Balba, currently call Kenya home.The World Health Organization website traces Ebola’s discovery to 1976 and links the virus to fruit bats. While covering the Ebola outbreak, Muller crisscrossed the sweltering-hot tropic landscape of West Africa witnessing the virus’ death toll. He said victims exhibit extreme flu-like symptoms before undergoing rapid dehydration and internal organ damage.West African nations ravaged by long civil wars lacked the basic necessities of efficiently functioning governments, transportation infrastructures and medical systems required to respond to Ebola. But Muller noted that the virus – once confronted with modern medicine – can be beaten.”There’s been a clear demonstration that if you contract Ebola, it’s a largely survivable illness,” he said.He said American politicians seized on the disease and the panic surrounding it during the mid-term congressional elections and then abandoned mention of Ebola after early November.”It was total exploitation,” he said.In addition to covering a deadly disease, Muller has been in places around the world where “there is lead in the air.” Experience has tempered his inquisitiveness – he won’t cover fighting in Iraq and Syria and said the air of uncertainty that hung over an assignment in Somalia counts among his scariest experiences.”It’s been intense; I’ve covered a lot of conflict. My mother and I have talked about it and she says, ?Remember, we have a very small family: We don’t want an empty seat at the table,'” he said.