[1] Researchers believe that a 2-year-old boy who lived in the village of Meliandou, Guéckédou Prefecture, Guinea was the index case of the current Ebola virus disease epidemic.

[3] With this background and in the context of poor public health systems,[4] the early cases were mis-diagnosed as diseases more common to the area.

[7][8] In a Tuesday, December 30, 2014 online world news story article by Richard Ingham from the Agence France-Presse (AFP) that was featured on the MSN homepage, it was revealed that a tree in the area where children had played at, playing with insect-eating free-tailed bats and hunting and grilling them to eat (they are a cousin of another well-known Ebola reservoir, the fruit bat, whose role in this outbreak is not as clear), is believed to be the point where human infection – likely by the bats – with Ebola in this current outbreak occurred, the 'ground zero' of the epidemic.

[9] Data comes from reports by the World Health Organization Global Alert and Response Unit[Resource 1] and the WHO's Regional Office for Africa.

[Resource 2] All numbers are correlated with United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), if available.