In 1976, while working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Piot was part of a team that observed a Marburg-like virus in a sample of blood taken from a sick nun working in Zaire. Piot and his colleagues subsequently traveled to Zaire as part of an International Commission set up by the Government of Zaire to help quell the outbreak. The International Commission made key discoveries into how the virus spread, and traveled from village to village, spreading information and putting the ill and those who had come into contact with them into quarantine. The epidemic was already waning when the International Commission arrived, thanks to measures taken by local and national authorities, and it finally stopped in three months, after it had killed almost 300 people. The events were dramatised by Mike Walker on BBC Radio 4 in December 2014 in a production by David Morley. Piot narrated the programme.