Stephen Gire and other health researchers on the ground in Africa had some hope that the Ebola outbreak was coming under control or at least plateauing in late May. Then came the funeral of a healer in Guinea. More than a dozen of the mourners contracted the disease there, probably by washing or touching the body, and took it to Sierra Leone, according to a new DNA mapping of the Ebola virus that scientists hope will help them understand what makes this killer tick.

"You had this huge burst after it looked like the outbreak was starting to die down," Gire said. "It sort of threw a wrench in the response."

Ebola exploded after that funeral and has now killed at least 1,552 people in West Africa. It's probably more than that, with 40 percent of the cases in the last three weeks, according to the World Health Organization. WHO officials said Thursday the outbreak continues to accelerate and could reach more than 20,000 cases eventually.

Gire and more than 50 colleagues - five of whom died from Ebola while fighting the outbreak in Africa - have mapped the genetic code of this strain of Ebola, and in so doing showed how crucial that May funeral was. They hope to use that to track mutations that could become more worrisome the longer the outbreak lasts. This detailed genetic mapping also could eventually make a bit of a difference in the way doctors spot and fight the disease, especially with work in preliminary vaccines.

On Thursday, officials at the National Institutes of Health announced that they were launching safety trials on a preliminary vaccine for Ebola. Researchers have already checked that still-not-tested vaccine against some of the more than 350 mutations in this strain of Ebola to make sure the changes the disease is making won't undercut science's hurried efforts to fight it, said Pardis Sabeti, a scientist at Harvard University and its affiliated Broad Institute.


She and Gire, also at Broad and Harvard, are two of the lead authors of a study, published Thursday in the journal Science, that maps the killer disease strain based on specimens collected from 78 patients.

The virus has mutated more than 300 times from previous strains of Ebola, Gire said. Researchers have also pinpointed about 50 places in the genetic code where the virus has changed since this outbreak started. So far, they don't know what any of those mutations mean, but they hope to find out.

A third top doctor has died from Ebola in Sierra Leone, a government official said Wednesday, as health workers tried to determine how a fourth scientist also contracted the disease before being evacuated to Europe.

The announcements raised worries about Sierra Leone's fight against Ebola, which already has killed more than 1,400 people across West Africa. The World Health Organization said it was sending a team to investigate how the epidemiologist now undergoing treatment in Germany may have contracted the disease that kills more than half its victims.


"The international surge of health workers is extremely important and if something happens, if health workers get infected and it scares off other international health workers from coming, we will be in dire straits," said Christy Feig, director of WHO communications.

Dr. Sahr Rogers had been working at a hospital in the eastern town of Kenema when he contracted Ebola, said Sierra Leonean presidential adviser Ibrahim Ben Kargbo on Wednesday. Two other top doctors already have succumbed to Ebola since the outbreak emerged there earlier this year, including Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, who also treated patients in Kenema.

Officials from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) say that a second, separate outbreak of the deadly virus has occurred in the country. Meanwhile, a Liberian doctor treated with an experimental serum against the illness has passed away.

DRC Health Minister Felix Numbi said that two of eight people who died from a "hemorrhagic fever" last week have been diagnosed with a strain of the disease in postmortem lab tests. The death toll of the sudden epidemic in the country's Equateur province has reached 13 in total.

"This epidemic has nothing to do with the one in West Africa," said Numbi. "The experience acquired during the six previous epidemics of Ebola will contribute to the containing of this illness."

DRC, then Zaire, was where the virus, which eventually kills patients by literally liquefying their organs, was first discovered in 1976. Numbi said that medical cordons have been erected around the town of Gera, where the patients were identified.

The first British person known to have contracted the deadly Ebola virus has been flown to London and is being treated by doctors.

He has been named as William Pooley, 29, a nurse who had travelled to Sierra Leone as a volunteer to help care for the victims of the Ebola outbreak. He was identified by Dr Robert Garry, an American scientist who worked with him at the Kenema Government Hospital in the south-east of Sierra Leone.

A specially equipped military aircraft flew Mr Pooley from Sierra Leone's main airport in Lungi to the UK on Sunday, landing at the RAF base in Northolt, where he was then transferred under police escort to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, London.

The hospital has Britain's only high-security infectious-disease unit, and Mr Pooley, who is described as "not currently seriously unwell," is being treated in a specialist isolation unit containing a tent made of plastic and rubber that separates the patient from medical staff while ensuring he can be observed.

Last week, when we reported on the latest breakout of a mysterious Ebola-like disease, which had claimed at least 70 people's live at last check, we were skeptical by the WHO's attempts to mask the fact that an Ebola outbreak is something else entirely, in a desperate attempt to avoid the panic that would inevitably result from the confirmation that the Ebola virus has officially made its way into the fifth country, this time the second largest African nation by surface area, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As Reuters reported at the time, citing a WHO spokesman who had sent an email to the news agency, "this is not Ebola" to which we mused: "perhaps the WHO is fibbing just a bit to prevent another all out panic. If not Ebola then what? According to WHO, the deaths are the result of an outbreak of hemorrhagic gastroenteritis, a disease prevalent in... dogs?

We concluded: "So is the WHO simply trying to prevent the spread of panic and deny that Ebola has now spread to the second largest country in Africa? We will surely find out soon enough, especially if the WHO, too, advises the population "to keep calm and BTFD"..."

Three days later we have the answer and sure enough, as we suspected the WHO was indeed lying.

Reuters confirms:

Democratic Republic of Congo declared an Ebola outbreak in its northern Equateur province on Sunday after two out of eight cases tested came back positive for the deadly virus, Health Minister Felix Kabange Numbi said. A mysterious disease has killed dozens of people in Equateur in recent weeks but the World Health Organization had said on Thursday it was not Ebola.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is conducting a nationwide search of its cold storage units after discovering vials of smallpox in a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cold storage room at the National Institutes of Health facility in Bethesda, Maryland. Along with the vials of smallpox were 327 other pathogens including vials labeled for dengue, influenza, and rickettsia. This news comes as the CDC is under multiple investigations for unsafe practices. In response to the news Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University remarked "It is ironic that the institution that sets U.S. standards for safety and security of work with human pathogens fails to meet its own standards."

Ebola continues to spread in West Africa as Sierra Leone voted to pass a new amendment imposing jail time for anyone caught hiding an Ebola patient.

With 142 new cases recorded, the total number is now 2,615 with 1,427 deaths, the World Health Organization said Friday. The group added that the magnitude of the Ebola outbreak has been "underestimated."

"Many families hide infected loved ones in their homes," the organization wrote in an assessment. "Others deny that a patient has Ebola and believe that care in an isolation ward - viewed as an incubator of the disease - will lead to infection and certain death. Most fear the stigma and social rejection that come to patients and families when a diagnosis of Ebola is confirmed."

The number of people dying in West Africa from the ongoing Ebola outbreak is poised to surpass the total number of people to ever have died from the virus in just 10 days, according to World Health Organization figures. Up until sometime in early 2014, the Ebola virus had killed 1,548 people since being discovered in 1976. As of Monday, Ebola had killed more than 1,350 people across West Africa in the five months since the outbreak was first declared there. Another 1,000 people could be dead by the end of October if the death rate continues at its current pace.

Despite an influx of money, materials and personnel, an average of more than 25 people died each day this August in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, according to the latest WHO figures. That rate has nearly doubled since July, when 13 people on average died each day.

A fever of unidentified origin has killed 13 people in the northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo since August 11, the health minister said. "All 13 people who have died suffered from a fever, diarrhea, vomiting and, in a terminal stage, of vomiting a black matter," Dr Felix Kabange Numbi said late Thursday.

So far, about 80 people who came into contact with the deceased are being monitored at their homes, he added.

But a World Health Organization (WHO) official and the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Friday it was too soon to tell whether a hemorrhagic fever caused the deaths, while an epidemic of often fatal and highly contagious Ebola raged in west Africa to the north.

"Many died presenting haemorragic symptoms, but there is also serious malaria that can cause this type of symptom, or typhoid fever," a WHO official based in Kinshasa told AFP, asking not to be named. "We're still waiting for biological confirmation to find out what kind of disease this is," said Amandine Colin of MSF, which has teams in the affected territory of Boende, in Equateur province.

Samples have been taken to be examined at the National Institute of Biomedical Research as well as a specialised laboratory in Gabon, Numbi said, adding that the results should come within days.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John Moore has covered wars in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among other places. But when he arrived in Liberia's capital city of Monrovia this month to report on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, he faced dangers of a different order.
Liberia has 972 probable, suspected, or confirmed cases of the disease, with 576 dead, more than any other country. Including the countries of Guinea, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, the death toll from Ebola has reached 1,350, according to the World Health Organization.

Since Moore's arrival in Monrovia, there has been an attack on an isolation center that sent quarantined Ebola patients fleeing. This week, Liberian soldiers quarantined Monrovia's West Point slum in an effort to contain the virus, provoking clashes with neighborhood residents.

Moore spoke to National Geographic about the harrowing scenes he's documented, the personal risks he faces - and the humanity that endures.