No one foresaw, back in December of 2013, that the little boy who fell ill in a village called Méliandou, in Guinea, West Africa, would be the starting point of a gruesome epidemic, one that would devastate three countries and provoke concern, fear, and argument around the planet.
No one imagined that this child’s death, after just a few days’ suffering, would be only the first of many thousands. His name was Emile Ouamouno. His symptoms were stark—intense fever, black stool, vomiting—but those could have been signs of other diseases, including malaria. Sad to say, children die of unidentified fevers and diarrheal ailments all too frequently in African villages. But soon the boy’s sister was dead too, and then his mother, his grandmother, a village midwife, and a nurse. The…
