Live Science: Did Ebola Strike Ancient Athens?

The Parthenon is one of the buildings on the acropolis of Athens.
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http://www.livescience.com/51236-ebola-strike-ancient-athens.html

by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | June 17, 2015 08:55am ET

Could the first recorded Ebola outbreak have occurred not in Africa less than 40 years ago, but rather, more than 2,400 years ago, in ancient Greece? That's what one professor of infectious diseases and history now suggests.

Most researchers say that the first outbreak of Ebola happened in 1976, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then known as Zaire). In the current outbreak of the virus in West Africa — which began in early 2014 in West Africa, and is the largest outbreak of Ebola to date — more than 27,000 people have been infected and nearly 11,200 people have died, according to the World Health Organization.

However, the Ebola virus is apparently quite old; previous research discovered remnants of identical Ebola DNA in several different species of rodents, including the mouse and the Norway rat. This led scientists to speculate that Ebola infected the ancestors of these species at least 20 million years ago.

The ancient nature of the disease "raises the question of whether Ebola may have spilled over from its animal reservoir to humans well before scientists first identified it in 1976," study author Powel Kazanjian, a professor of history and infectious diseases at the University of Michigan, told Live Science.

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