On Sunday, Twitter followers of Yahoo! News received disturbing information that there was a current outbreak of the Ebola virus in Atlanta with an estimated 145 patients already infected. Officials of the site were quick to retract the information saying that this was, "an unauthorized tweet with misinformation on Ebola," they have also asked their followers to disregard the information.
The news about the alleged Atlanta incident comes in the heels of the arrival of the two American aid workers who became infected with the virus a while on a mission in West Africa where the situation has escalated to what the World Health Organization is now calling a global emergency. They are being treated in facilities in this area.
Meanwhile, people cannot help but associate this latest Twitter blast to the 1989 outbreak of Ebola, but was previously known as the Reston virus, a strain of the Ebola virus that was nonlethal to humans. That year, dozens of test animals that were important from the Philippines suddenly started dying at the Hazelton Research Products Primate Quarantine Facility in Reston, Atlanta. Concerned that they might have been encountering a hemorrhagic fever outbreak, the monkeys were tested and the preliminary results initially led researchers to believe that they were dealing with the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus. This information immediately alarmed researchers since this strain had a reported 90% fatality rate in humans. What led them to believe otherwise was that four of their facility workers tested positive for the virus but never actually became sick. Further testing revealed that it was a different strain of the virus, and was actually what we now know as the Ebola-Reston strain.
Looking back, it was probably the Reston crisis that made the American public aware of the Ebola virus. However, more attention was being directed towards the AIDS epidemic that was hitting United States that same year.
