Fever Country

In September 1976, a leaking thermos flask arrived at a laboratory in Antwerp. Inside were blood samples from patients dying of an unknown disease in a remote village in central Africa. The young scientist who opened it looked at the contents under an electron microscope and saw something no one had ever described: a long, sinuous, thread-like structure unlike anything in the scientific literature. He named it after the nearest river on his map. He could not have known then what that name would come to mean.

Nearly fifty years later, the Ebola virus has caused more than thirty documented outbreaks, killed more than fifteen thousand people, and produced the largest infectious disease epidemic in African history. It has also, in the decade since that epidemic, been met with two licensed vaccines, two approved treatments, and the most sophisticated outbreak response methodology in the history of tropical medicine.

Fever Country is the complete story of the Ebola virus - from its discovery in the villages of Yambuku and Nzara in 1976 to the latest vaccine and treatment advances of 2026. It traces the biology of the virus, the forty-year search for its animal reservoir, the history of every major outbreak, the catastrophic 2014 West Africa epidemic that changed the world's understanding of what Ebola could become, and the extraordinary science that transformed it from a disease with no treatment and near-certain death into a disease that most patients survive when treated early.

Written for the general reader, Fever Country separates fact from fear, corrects the misconceptions that have surrounded Ebola since its discovery, and tells the full human story - the scientists, the healthcare workers, the survivors, and the communities at the centre of one of the most important infectious disease stories of our time.