The world's biggest and deadliest Ebola outbreak began with a 2-year-old boy in a village in Guéckédou, Guinea — near the West African country's borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia — a team of researchers reports in The New England Journal of Medicine. The boy died of unidentified causes on Dec. 6, followed a week later by his mother, then 3-year-old sister, then grandmother. Mourners at the grandmother's funeral brought the virus to other villages.
The early victims had symptoms of Ebola, but the outbreak is in a part of Africa with no history of the disease, so health workers weren't trained to spot or treat the disease. And because it's a heavily trafficked region, the disease has been very difficult to track down and isolate.
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