From the Archives: How the World’s Deadliest Ebola Outbreak Unfolded

A mysterious and deadly illness began to spread across the forest region of the West African country of Guinea in early 2014.

For three months, it was mistaken for cholera or malaria. But when Guinea’s government sent a team of scientists to investigate, the blood samples they collected would reveal that the string of deaths was actually caused by the Ebola virus.

As the 2015 FRONTLINE documentary Outbreak explored, it was the start of what would go on to become the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record.

The documentary, which is newly available to watch on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, traced Ebola’s devastating path in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia through the eyes of the people impacted — including the father of a one-year-old Guinean child, Emile Ouamouno, believed to be the first person to die in the outbreak.

“He had a fever. He was shivering,” Etienne Ouamouno told FRONTLINE about Emile. “After two days, he got worse. He got diarrhea and stopped eating. Then he died.”

Many more people would die in the weeks and months to come, including nurses, doctors and other health workers who cared for Ebola patients.

“I start to wonder, ‘What is happening? Maybe this is the end of the world. Maybe everybody’s going to die,’” said Josephine Sellu, then deputy head nurse at Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, one of numerous health workers in West Africa to describe their experiences during the outbreak in the documentary.

By the time FRONTLINE’s investigation aired in May 2015, the outbreak’s official death toll had topped 10,000, with the true figure believed to be higher. In examining why the historic outbreak wasn’t stopped sooner, Outbreak drew on revelatory and candid admissions of failure from key government and public health officials, some of whom were speaking publicly for the first time. The investigation probed the international response — including that of the World Health Organization (WHO), which is part of the United Nations and had been criticized for not declaring the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern earlier. “We had the idea that Ebola was something which was severe but typically occurred in a certain way, and then could be handled,” Dr. Keiji Fukuda, then assistant director-general for health security at WHO, told FRONTLINE about WHO’s response to the start of the outbreak. “But at that time, we didn’t really know how complex it was going to become.”

Outbreak interwove a timeline of the local and international responses with stories of the virus’s human toll — including how Ebola ravaged the densely populated district of West Point in Liberia’s capital of Monrovia. A woman there named Finda Fallah described first losing her mother, sister and husband to Ebola, and then three of her children.

“He just looked at me, crying, ‘Mama, I don’t want to die,’” Fallah said in the film of her youngest boy, Tamba. “Then he stopped talking. That was when they came for him. Then he died in my arms.”

The outbreak wouldn’t be declared over until June 2016, with a recorded 11,325 people dying of Ebola and more than 28,000 infections.

Outbreak raised prescient questions about whether governments and global health organizations were prepared to respond effectively the next time a major infectious epidemic arose.

“There are going to be more of these, no matter what we think,” Dr. Bruce Aylward, then assistant director-general for emergencies at WHO, said in the documentary. “More and more new diseases are emerging. We’ve seen pandemic flu. We’ve seen SARS. We’ve seen Ebola like this. And we are not prepared. Ebola was not an exception, Ebola is a precedent.”

Directed by Dan Edge and produced by Edge and Sasha Joelle Achilli, Outbreak is the latest documentary from FRONTLINE’s extensive archives to be released on the series’ YouTube channel. You can also watch it in the PBS App and in FRONTLINE’s online collection of more than 300 streaming documentaries.