u/AcornAl

Kenya has confirmed its first imported case of Ebola (Bundibugyo) virus disease after a Kenyan citizen who had been living in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for seven years died while receiving treatment in Nairobi.

Health Cabinet Secretary Aden Duale today said the patient had fallen ill about a month ago while in the DRC, where he was treated at several health facilities before travelling by road from the DRC to Kampala and subsequently flying to Nairobi.

“The patient arrived in Nairobi aboard Jambo Jet flight 8523 and underwent routine public health screening at the port health and immigration desks at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA),” the CS said during a presser at Afya house today.

He explained that the citizen was later taken directly from the airport to a Nairobi hospital by a relative and a friend, where he was isolated after presenting with fever, chills, intense fatigue and weakness, muscle pain, painful swallowing, sore throat and bleeding under the skin at injection sites.

Duale said samples taken from the patient tested positive for Bundibugyo Ebola virus disease at both the National Virology Reference Laboratory and the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) laboratory.

The patient was placed on supportive treatment but died last night, with the Ministry saying arrangements for a safe and dignified burial were under way.

Duale said 28 contacts of the deceased, including family members and health workers, had so far been identified and were being followed up.

The Ministry is also tracing 23 passengers and four crew members who travelled on the same flight as the deceased, with arrangements for quarantine of people considered at risk under way.

Two more people in the Netherlands have died as a result of symptoms caused by a West Nile virus infection according to Dutch public health institute RIVM. Three people have died this year from the disease, the RIVM said on Thursday. A total of 18 human cases of West Nile have been diagnosed in the country this year, twice the total the institute confirmed last week, and infections are spreading among horses and birds, with crows showing a high rate of death. ... Not a single person was confirmed to have the infection in all of 2025.

[...]

There infections arose in six total provinces, the RIVM stated in its update. "The patients contracted West Nile virus after being bitten by an infected mosquito in the provinces of Utrecht, Noord-Brabant, Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Overijssel, and Gelderland," the RIVM confirmed, with the two latter regions being mentioned for the first time in the current outbreak.

[...]

West Nile virus was first found in someone in the Netherlands nearly six years ago. It was first observed in the country a few weeks earlier during the summer of 2020.

Around 20 percent of people infected with West Nile virus begin to show mild symptoms similar to the flu, the RIVM said. Common symptoms include fever, headache, upset stomach, muscle aches, stomach pain, and diarrhea. It can also cause swollen lymph nodes, or a rash.

More serious symptoms present in about 1 percent of patients infected with the virus. This includes encephalitis and meningitis. When serious symptoms develop, survival rate ranges from 86 to 96 percent. However, the risk of death in people over 70 years of age can be twice as likely.

The West Nile virus is also spreading among horses and birds, according to researchers. "Since the previous update on September 3, the NVWA has received 53 reports of horses with West Nile virus. This brings the total number of reports in 2026 to 58 horses."

A joint research group also found that "23 dead and 10 living wild birds tested positive for West Nile virus last week. Up to and including September 2, 2026, there were six birds with West Nile virus. In total, 39 birds with West Nile virus have now been reported in 2026."

The RIVM said that there was a strikingly high morbidity rate among birds in the Corvid family, such as various crows. Birds native to the Netherlands in this group include the black carrion crow, the Eurasian magpie, rooks, the Eurasian Jay, and the common raven

Gay Small was supposed to spend Labor Day weekend in North Carolina, taking long walks with her sister, picking apples with her grandkids.

But she died at Tampa General Hospital early Friday, her 80th birthday. From a mosquito bite, her family said.

Health officials have not confirmed the cause of death to the public, but that’s what her kids say they were told. If so, Small would be Tampa Bay’s first fatality in almost a century from dengue fever.

She most likely caught it within a couple of miles of her condo on Bayshore Boulevard.

“She hasn’t traveled. She doesn’t drive. She hadn’t left the city limits in more than a month,” said her daughter, Anna Small, 55.

Gay was healthy, her daughter said. The only pills she took were vitamins. She walked at least five miles a day, often along Tampa’s Riverwalk.

Since July, more than 200 Floridians have been hospitalized for dengue fever, far more than in any other state.

The tropical disease normally is contracted when people travel overseas.

But this summer, record numbers of people have been infected in Tampa Bay. The week before Small died, the number of locally acquired dengue infections in Hillsborough County doubled to 59. That’s more than 10 times the cases of other Florida counties.

The morning she died the Tampa Bay Times posted a story about the outbreak. A few hours later, the state’s surgeon general held a news conference to warn the public.

“Americans don’t expect it to be here. But it’s here,” Anna Small said. “And for some people, it’s really serious.”

In seven days, Gay Small went from feeling tired to her organs shutting down.

[...]

Achieved version

Residents in western North Carolina may have been exposed to the infected goats from Farm Adventures at the mobile petting zoo’s location in Harmony or at off-site events between July 28 and August 27.

Exposure may have happened at 10 locations, including an assisted living facility and back-to-school bash.

Those affected are urged to contact their local health department to determine whether they need medication to prevent infection.

[...]

Love said a wild skunk was found in the goat enclosure on July 29, and the animal was shot and burned. The goats did not appear to have been bitten and showed no signs of rabies, according to Love. But one goat died on August 19. The next day, she said, another goat became ill and was euthanized.

Lab testing found the virus in three of the baby goats, and a fourth is also assumed to have been infected. No other animals on the farm pose a risk of rabies exposure to people, the department said.

[...]

Rabies transmission from livestock holds a lower risk than bites from wild animals, but people can still be exposed to the virus through saliva from an infected animal, the North Carolina health department said.

“Because baby goats are frequently bottle-fed, handled closely, or cuddled, public health officials are working proactively to ensure anyone who had direct contact with the affected animals is evaluated,” the department said.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) today welcomed the end of the Ebola outbreak due to Bundibugyo species in Uganda. This follows 42 consecutive days without a new confirmed case since the country’s last patient, an imported case, was discharged from care on 16 July 2026.

The completion of the 42-day period, equivalent to twice the upper limit of the incubation period for Ebola, is a critical step, as it provides an additional safeguard that no chains of transmission associated with the last imported case have been missed. The 42-day countdown is the internationally established benchmark for determining that transmission linked to an Ebola outbreak has ended.

[...]

A small bit of good news from the area. In total they had 20 confirmed cases, and two deaths.

As for the DRC on August 25 it continues to escalate. There have been 5,713 confirmed cases, and 2,744 deaths across 6 provinces and 58 affected health zones. Case fatality rate is at 48%.

It turns out mobile phones are "Trojan horses" for carrying germs. That's according to Lotti Tajouri, an associate professor in molecular biology and genomics at Bond University and Murdoch University.

He found more than 17,000 micro-organisms, including bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites, living on 95 mobile phones he studied.

And with 80 per cent of people surveyed by Dr Tajouri admitting to using their phone in a public toilet, we can start to understand how they get there.

"Mobile phones behave like biological magnets," he says, adding their warm and moist conditions act like "five-star hotel accommodation for microorganisms".

If you're understandably grossed out, keep reading to find out the best way to clean your phone, and how often you need to be doing it.

What lives on our phone and is it harmful?

In the 95 phones Dr Tajouri and his team analysed, they also found super bugs (germs that are very hard to treat), antibiotic resistant genes, and virulence factor genes (these increase a pathogen's ability to cause disease).

He says micro-organisms thrive on phones because they are high-touch surfaces that deliver the right "breeding ground" conditions.

"We load them with all sorts of microbes through our fingers … and when we talk into them, we drop little droplets of saliva.

We transfer these germs back to our faces, Dr Tajouri says, by touching our lips, eyes and nose on average 25 times in an hour.

"Eighty per cent of common infections are associated with hands. Mobile phones negate handwashing."

[...]

Interesting analysis & charts of various factors behind the WHO's concerns.

• Ebola cases in the first 100 days
• 'Hidden' transmission - deaths in the community
• Attacks on aid workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Mass movement in the DRC
• CFRs of recent Ebola virus outbreaks

Another recent discussion here on this prediction, and the latest WHO Disease Outbreak News release (14 Aug)

Scientists used an artificial intelligence program to create new viral genomes that are different from any known natural viruses and that targeted specific hosts, according to a new study.

[..]

Scientists from Stanford University and the Arc Institute then used the AI to generate thousands of genome combinations within a specific framework – specifically one that could be hosted by an E. coli bacteria cell. Of the thousands of genomes that the AI generated, scientists built and tested about 300 in the lab and found that 16 were viable viruses.

The new viruses are bacteriophages, which infect bacteria but cannot affect humans.

[..]

According to the research, the genetic library helped the AI “learn the evolutionary constraints” of natural genomes, but the scientists found that one of the new viruses had an aspect that was “evolutionarily distant” — suggesting that the AI prompted changes that could have taken millions of years for natural evolution to show was possible.

Tests showed that a mixture of the new viruses could overcome antibacterial resistance in some of the E. coli strains, something that a “comparable mixture of naturally sourced” phages could not.

This “lays out a path for generating adaptive and resilient phage therapies against rapidly evolving pathogens,” the authors wrote.

[..]

“Although this is promising for life sciences applications, it also raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions,” doctors from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security wrote in a corresponding article published in Science.

“The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not,” they wrote.

The authors of the response article single out one particularly risky area that they say should not be pursued: eukaryote-infecting pathogens, which can cause a variety of infections in humans, including malaria and certain yeast infections.

“Such genomes might encode new pathogens that can infect humans, animals, or plants in ways that cannot be contained by existing countermeasures,” they wrote.

A discussion last year here on the pre-print.

Louisiana health officials are urging residents to take precautions against a flesh-eating bacterial infection following the deaths of five people this year.

The Louisiana Department of Health issued a warning about the infection, known as Vibrio vulnificus, in a press release on Thursday.

The department said nine people have been infected this year and five have died. By comparison, Louisiana averaged seven cases and one death annually over the previous 10 years during the same time period.

All of this year’s reported cases were linked to wounds exposed to seawater, and all patients had underlying health conditions, the department added.

[...]

Louisiana Department of Health Statement

The state of Tlaxcala has reported its first case of New World screwworm (NWS) in a human, along with three other probable cases and two ruled out, according to the head of the Tlaxcala Health Secretariat (Sesa), Rigoberto Zamudio Meneses, through his official social media accounts.

This information was confirmed during Thursday’s “Circular Dialogue,” organized by the state government’s Communications Coordination Office (CCOM). It was reported that the case involved an elderly resident of the Santa María Acuitlapilco community in the municipality of Tlaxcala, who is already receiving medical care to prevent complications from the parasite.

[...]

Regarding the affected elderly person, the parasite was detected in the ear. However, the patient is out of danger and remains under medical observation to ensure that no complications develop.

He also regretted that the patient was an elderly person living in conditions of neglect. The individual went to a health center to receive medical attention, which made it possible to detect the parasite and intervene immediately.

Jorge Caballero Román, the state delegate for Agriculture, noted that cases of New World screwworm in humans tend to occur among people who are living in situations of neglect and who have lost sensitivity in some part of their bodies.

He explained that this is because the parasite lays its eggs in open wounds, allowing the larvae to feed on living tissue and flesh. This causes pain that may go unnoticed when a person has lost sensation and lacks a support network to help care for wounds and monitor their proper healing.

Playing with a side project, and trying to determine the start dates for all of the US seasons, 1 through 13.

Any additional info that I've missed would be cool to try and more accurately determine these. I've assume references to thanksgiving were for the US holiday.

I've tried to keep spoilers to a minimum.

• S01 - 22 Oct 2014
• S02 - Mid-Aug or mid-Sep 2015
• S03 - late summer or autumn
• S04 - 21 Oct 2016
• S05 - Sep 2017?
• S06 - 10 Sep 2018
• S07 - 18 Sep 2019
• S08 - 17 Sep 2020
• S09 - 18 Sep 2021
• S10 - 2 Sep 2022
• S11 - 7 Sep 2023
• S12 - 21 May 2024
• S13 - 7 Sep 2025

Season 01 (2014)

I've seen estimates of Nov to Dec, but these seem wrong.

E04 If anyone knows >!Mitch!< or their social media, on day 6 they noted:

>It's my little girl's birthday. She turns four years old today.

Two references to Thanksgiving that fell on 27 Nov.

E07 - 18:02 (Day 25)

>I don't want to spend [bleep] Christmas out here. I want to spend it with the people I care about. Or even [bleep] Thanksgiving.

E09 (Day 42 - E10 if you include the special).

>(voiceover) I think tomorrow is, like, Thanksgiving.

So these suggest Oct, and the second would place the drop-off on 17 Oct.

However E10, a contestant shows off the stick they were tracking days and stated

>First thing every morning I'd get up, take my kukri, and I just lived to put a new notch in it. Each one represents overcoming something every day, and I know that [one] was October 22nd.

Based on wind patterns off the coast of Solander Island, a drop date of 21/22 Oct seems to be the closest match. Poor weather data recorded at Quatsino to compare.

So the drop date is likely 22 Oct.

Side-note, there was a full or nearly full moon shown on day 6 and 43, so at least one of these are wrong (a moon cycle is 29.5 days).

Season 02 (2015)

Limited data, but most suggest a much earlier drop date.

E11 - If anyone knows >!Nicole!< or their social media, on day 52 they noted:

>Today is my youngest son's eighth birthday.

Only reference to Thanksgiving (26 Nov) was when the winner was asked about the hypothetical scenario in the The Reunion special.

>If you were forced to stay there longer, could you have gone?

>Thanksgiving, I wrote off; I knew, "Okay, I'm out here for Thanksgiving; I'm gonna miss that big feast and everything and miss my kids."

This implies they considered this, but didn't have to miss it. Some time before 21 Sep.

And I'm unsure if this is a reference to the larger new moon tides (11 Nov) or first quarter (18 Nov).

>I knew I was coming into a bad tide cycle, where it was gonna be hard to fish

More analysis (see below) narrows this to the middle of the month, but what month is still unclear.

Drop date mid-Aug or mid-Sep.

Season 03 (2016)

A late autumn start would point to late May / early June.

E07 - >!Carleigh!< had their birthday on day 53

E08 - >!Megan!< on day 68

>Today is my, um, son's sixth birthday.

Using Bariloche Aerodrome (75 km NE similar elevation), temperatures would have significantly fallen around 10 May (-7C/19F) that didn't seem apparent on the show.

Casting usually takes around 2 to 3 months, and they had a winter bootcamp in NY

Day 75 - Orange Peel Fungus seen, fruits summer to autumn, but checking iNaturalist, observations seem common between March and June. Rose hips showed leave fall plus plump hips, suggest late autumn/early winter.

Possibly more importantly was that the fishing season at Lago Escondido is was 1 Nov 2015 to 31 May 2016 with a mandatory return of fish in May. Possible late summer start?

Drop date unknown.

Season 04 (2016)

E10 - day 65

>Who would have ever thought we'd be out here till Christmas Eve?

>I cannot believe that we have spent Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas out here.

E10 - day 66

>Yay, Merry Christmas, everybody.

Drop date 21 October

Season 05 (2017)

Lack of references to thanksgiving or other holidays suggests this was before 24 Sep.

Drop date unknown.

Season 06 (2018)

E09 - day 52

>It's freaking Halloween!

Drop date 10 Sep

Season 07 (2019)

E08 - day 44

>Happy Halloween.

Late game reference to Christmas

>So today is >!99, Christmas Day. !<

Drop date 18 Sep

Season 08 (2020)

E11 - day 71 (thanksgiving was 26 Nov)

>Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Also gill nets were not allowed until day 45, if someone has the fishing regulations they would help confirm the date.

Drop date 17 Sep

Season 09 (2021)

E08 - day 44 (2 different contestants)

>Happy Halloween, y'all.

>Happy Halloween!

Not a specific date, but at day 61 this confirms it's before 25 Sep

>there's one piece of grouse left. But I've been saving that for American Thanksgiving.

>It's not American Thanksgiving, but I'm gonna have to eat the last piece of grouse.

Drop date 18 Sep

Season 10 (2022)

E09 - day 43 >!Alan!<

>Happy birthday to me!

E10 - day 51 >!Mikey!<

>Today is my son's fifth birthday.

First snow was day 40, takes a few days to clear before another small dump day 50, with fronts day 53 and 63 match up nicely with the observations from Lynn Lake.

Drop date 2 Sep

Season 11 (2023)

E04 - Day 12 >!Timber !<

>Happy birthday, Elliot.

E11 - Day 74 >!William!<

>It is my boy's birthday.

Based on the sunrise/sunset seemed like a good way, but the low sun angle and long twilight makes these hard to pin-point exact solar time, and it relies on the captions to be accurate.

• Day one: sunset before 10:49pm 40F - after 27 Aug
• Day two: sunrise after 6:42am - after 22 Aug
• Day 18: sunrise after 7:47am - after 8 Sep
• Day 29: sunrise after 9:14am 33F - after 2 Oct
• Day 71: sunrise around 11:01am - around 1 Nov
• Day 76: sun still up at 3:17 - before 4 Dec

Unsourced Wikipedia reference suggesting the 18th Sep

However, the best indicator seems to be the first snow. At Inuvik, 3 cm was recorded 8 Oct that lasted for a couple days, before more snow 11 Oct that stayed around. This seems to match the snow seen on the show. First snow starts afternoon day 31, decent amount morning day 32.

Snow readings are apparently done early in the morning, so that suggests a start date of 7 Sep.

Side-note: The main event day (>!Moose!<) suggested it was 58F, which is a couple of degrees hotter than the actual max that day. If they were taking the temps at base camp, these were likely slightly hotter than those taken in a weather station that would be in an instrument shelter.

Season 12 (2024)

An autumn start would point to late May / early June.

Family situation: >!Death of a family member (May 23, 2024) before the contestant made it home. Without any delays for re-feeding or flight booking, day 15 + 1 day travel !< places the drop date on or before 7 May? Alternatively, they signed a "do not notify" clause and arrived before May 23.

However, the unusual weather event is likely the best method to determine the drop date.

Drop date 21 May (±1 day)

Season 13 (2025)

Unsourced Wikipedia reference suggesting the 16th Sep.

No nets allowed for the first 10 days. This matches the Peel and Husky Channels closures between August 7 - September 15 (inclusive).

This suggests a drop date of 6 Sep

First snow was seen during the first med check on day 21. This only lasted a few days, matching the snowfall recorded at Inuvik on the 28 Sep.

Drop date 8 Sep

For the first time, the Ministry of Health declared a health alert for hantavirus, a measure that extends from the Atacama region to the Magallanes region and will be in effect until July 31, 2027.

The decree published in the Official Gazette also considers a situation of "multi-risk health" as it occurs simultaneously with other risks such as arboviruses, that is, diseases transmitted by mosquitoes such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever; and avian influenza.

In this regard, the Undersecretary of Public Health, Dr. Alejandra Pizarro, explained that "the hantavirus causes a disease that is endemic to Chile, transmitted by the long-tailed pygmy rice rat that lives in rural and semi-rural areas of almost the entire country. As a ministry, we are constantly monitoring its behavior and we are very concerned and working because this year the lethality of the virus has increased, and due to this, we decided to declare this alert."

With this, Pizarro indicated that "until last week there were 46 infections and 18 deaths, which represents a lethality of 39%."

Meanwhile, in 2025 there were 44 infections and eight deaths, meaning the case fatality rate was 18%. So far this year, cases have occurred in the regions of Valparaíso, Metropolitan, O'Higgins, Maule, Ñuble, Biobío, La Araucanía, Los Ríos, Los Lagos, and Aysén.

The alert, which is preventive and preparatory, will allow the granting of extraordinary powers in the face of serious health risk emergencies to strengthen surveillance, timely resource management, the hiring of specialized personnel, health control action and the expedited acquisition of supplies through direct contracting.

The alert does not imply that there is an ongoing epidemic or that healthcare is overwhelmed.

"Hantavirus is not exclusively a summer virus, as the long-tailed pygmy rice rat is present year-round. That's why we urge everyone to take extreme precautions: avoid touching rodents, ventilate homes before entering if they have been closed, clean unused spaces with water and bleach, and keep garbage covered and food stored away," Pizarro explained.

Furthermore, he indicated that "it is essential to be attentive to the symptoms: fever, intense muscle pain, and difficulty breathing. If someone experiences these symptoms and has been in rural or semi-rural areas where the long-tailed pygmy rice rat may have been present, they should immediately go to a health center and inform the medical staff so that they can consider a hantavirus diagnosis in a timely manner."

It should be remembered that, since December 2025, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has maintained an epidemiological alert due to the rise in hantavirus cases throughout the Southern Cone, and that the Ministry of Health had an epidemiological alert in place since November of last year.

Other diseases

The Health Alert decree also covers diseases transmitted by the Aedes aegypti, Aedes vexans, and Anopheles pseudopunctipennis mosquitoes, such as dengue and Zika. According to the alert, these diseases "have a high epidemic potential, which could generate high demand and overload for health facilities." For these cases, the alert is in effect from Arica to Los Ríos.

In the case of avian influenza, the alert was extended to the entire country, because unlike other years, the disease has been concentrated in wild and farm birds, not in poultry farms, increasing the risk of exposure for people.

UK holidaymakers are being warned about a nasty infectious disease called cyclosporiasis that can cause explosive diarrhoea, after a sharp rise in cases.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said 67 cases have been reported since April, with many of them among travellers returning from Mexico.

[..]

Between 30 April and 15 July 2026, 30 cases have been reported in England, 27 in Scotland and 10 in Wales, according to the UKHSA.

Of the 52 cases with travel information available, 48 reported having travelled to Mexico, with many saying they had stayed in either the white sand beach resort area of Riviera Maya, or slightly north of there in coastal Cancún.

The UKHSA said those affected reported staying in "a range of different hotels and consuming a variety of different food and drink within their resort as part of an all-inclusive holiday package".

There are ongoing investigations and monitoring of the situation.

[..]

Some who have been struck by it describe having to use the toilet up to 20 times a day, due to the frequent and explosive nature of the watery diarrhoea that's the main symptom.

The intestinal illness has recently affected thousands of people in the US.

Nick Palmiter, who is 29 and from Monroe County in Michigan, told the BBC he experienced feeling constant pressure and bubbling, "almost like you have a balloon in your stomach".

Although most cases resolve on their own, antibiotics can be given to treat severe or prolonged infections.

The UKHSA said it anticipates there will be more cases linked to increased summer travel to Mexico and possibly the US too.

Dr Philip Veal from the agency said: "If you develop symptoms after returning from travel, such as watery diarrhoea, loss of appetite, weight loss, stomach cramps or pain, bloating, increased wind, nausea, fatigue or other flu-like symptoms, please seek medical attention and inform your healthcare professional of your travel history."

Mysterious deaths that extinguished entire families. A cemetery unable to cope with the flood of dead bodies. Taxi drivers who refused to go to certain parts of town. Months before the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) officially declared its latest Ebola outbreak on 15 May, the disease was already sowing fear and death in Mongbwalu, a gold mining town in Ituri province, an unpublished analysis by three researchers suggests.

After interviewing almost 100 people in and around Mongbwalu—including nurses and doctors, community leaders, survivors, grieving family members, coffinmakers, and cemetery caretakers—the team concluded the epidemic ignited in January, and perhaps even earlier, in Mongbwalu’s outskirts. A patient seeking care may have brought it to the city from a rural area.

By the time health authorities in the distant capital, Kinshasa, recognized the disease as Ebola, a “widespread, sprawling epidemic” was already underway, the team says in a PowerPoint presentation that is circulating in a WhatsApp group in the DRC and that Science obtained. One of the researchers, anthropologist Jules Villa of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, also presented the findings to a group of researchers on a Zoom call today, and Villa said the team is also submitting a correspondence piece to The Lancet.

“This could and probably should have been detected earlier,” says a former U.S. official who was involved in the response to the largest Ebola epidemic so far, between 2014 and ’16 in West Africa. The big question is why the disease was not recognized as Ebola much earlier, says the former official, who asked not to be named to speak freely about the DRC’s surveillance system. “Many in the community [knew] something serious was going on.”

The failure to raise the alarm has made controlling the epidemic much harder. With 3360 cases recorded since mid-May, including 1487 deaths, the epidemic is now about to become the second largest on record. “If the outbreak could have been contained in Mongbwalu, it would have been much easier to control,” says Manuel Albela, an epidemiologist with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) who’s currently working in Mongbwalu.

Anecdotal reports of early cases had suggested the cradle of the epidemic was Mongbwalu, some 75 kilometers northwest of the provincial capital Bunia, where the epidemic exploded later. To investigate that theory, the team—which also included Roger Buju, a medical researcher at the University of Bunia, and Alain Alithum Bero, a social scientist working for a nongovernmental organization in Ituri—spent more than 1 month in the town, with funding from the World Health Organization (WHO). “This was not an attempt to find a ‘patient zero,’ but to gain a greater understanding of the outbreak from the perspective of the communities where it first began,” WHO said in a statement sent to Science.

[...]

One transmission chain started with a 50-year-old woman identified only as A who died on 25 January after vomiting blood. Her mother died 6 days later; her husband fell ill but recovered. On 11 February, A’s nephew died, bleeding profusely from facial orifices. He was buried the next day, during a funeral attended by many people. The nephew’s wife died a few days later, and then their child. Several more people in the family passed away. Others fell ill but recovered.

Altogether, the scientists identified more than 500 suspected cases between mid-January and 15 May. Medical staff were hit hard, as often happens early during Ebola outbreaks: Thirteen “front-line workers”—including nurses, midwives, and Red Cross first responders—died, and 42 others fell ill but recovered, Villa told researchers on today’s call. Some private health care facilities closed and health care workers fled. Mongbwalu’s cemetery was overstretched, with as many as 20 burials in a single day.

Until now, estimates about when the epidemic started had relied mostly on genetic evidence. Comparing the sequences of Ebola virus found in patients allows scientists to build a family tree and estimate the age of the earliest common ancestor. One such analysis, posted online in early July, suggested the earliest cases occurred in mid-March. But most of the genomes analyzed so far came from Bunia, where the disease erupted later. “I think January is plausible … because we don’t have many sequences from Mongbwalu,” says an author of the analysis, evolutionary biologist Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh.

[..]

As late as 8 May, the chief medical officer for the Mongbwalu health zone, Ruben Dedja Denyo, acknowledged “unusual occurrences” to a local newspaper but stressed “there is no epidemic, as the recorded cases do not present similar symptoms.” One week later, the DRC declared its 17th Ebola outbreak.

Congo’s Ebola epidemic started at least 4 months before it was detected