© GETTY IMAGES/STEPHEN ASHTON/EYEEMDown a dirt path outside of the village of Meliandou in Guinea once stood a tall, hollow tree where children used to play. Not anymore. This tree, now notorious as the potential starting point of the deadly Ebola outbreak that ripped through West Africa a few years ago, was burned after the disease sickened and killed hundreds of people over a four-month period. More than 10,000 ultimately succumbed to the disease between 2014 and 2016.
In April 2014, just a few months after the outbreak began, epidemiologist Fabian Leendertz of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and his colleagues went on a month-long expedition in southeastern Guinea to identify the source of the epidemic, which was suspected to have jumped from animals to humans. Fairly quickly, the team ruled out apes and other large animals as the zoonotic host for this Ebola outbreak. Numbers of grazing animals in West Africa appeared unaffected, and great ape populations may have actually increased, as the outbreak raced through Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.
Another possibility that Leendertz and his team considered was bats. Local children commonly hunted the flying mammals, the scientists learned. In time, Meliandou villagers told Leendertz and his colleagues about ...
