Photo from the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea. Volunteers go door-to-door sharing information about the deadly virus.
[Pin It] Photo from the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea. Volunteers go door-to-door sharing information about the deadly virus.
Credit: CDC/ Sally Ezra
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In some parts of Africa, myths that Ebola was brought to the regions by health care workers have hurt the ability of workers to respond to the outbreak. But where did Ebola really come from?
The true reservoir for Ebola — that is, where the virus hides when it's not causing outbreaks in people — is not known for sure, but experts say that bats are the likely source of the deadly virus.
The first known human cases of Ebola occurred in 1976 during two simultaneous outbreaks in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which sickened more than 600 people, according to the World Health Organization.
Nearly 20 years later, in 2005, researchers looking for the reservoir of Ebola sampled more than 1,000 small animals in the Central African nations of Gabon and the Republic of the Congo, which have also experienced outbreaks of Ebola. They tested 679 bats, 222 birds and 129 small terrestrial vertebrates.
"There's a strong circumstantial case, but we haven’t actually got a total smoking gun," said Derek Gatherer, a bioinformatics researcher at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. [2014 Ebola Outbreak: Full Coverage of the Viral Epidemic]
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