History of ebola
Where It Began
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The first known case of Ebola erupted in 1976 in a rat and bat infested cotton factory located in South Sudan. At one point almost all the labourers turned mysteriously sick and soon after died. Nobody knew the cause. Later the virus got transmitted to Zaire which is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo by a mission worker who had just recently arrived from South Sudan.
Once it moved to Zaire doctors there recognized it to be a new virus so they named it after the Ebola River located in North Zaire; where it was first discovered. We now know that the rats and bats in the cotton factory were victims of Ebola and had transmitted the virus to the factory workers. At that point Ebola seamed to die out and no more cases were heard of until 1994.
The Start of the Current Epidemic
Between 1994 and the year 2000 mass numbers of gorillas and chimps died from being infected by Ebola. These apes were eaten as bush meat by local villagers and tribes causing a spillover event. A spillover event is when an infectious agent such as a virus gets transmitted from a certain species of animal hosts to another species such as humans. This is exactly what happened in this case. The villagers and tribe members who ate the bush meat got the Ebola virus and not-knowingly they transmitted it to almost everyone they had contact with and the virus kept spreading which has led to today's epidemic.