埃博拉病毒被科学家所关注是从1976年9月29日开始的。这一天,比利时安特卫普的一所微生物学实验室接收了一份来自非洲国家刚果(金)的血液样本包裹,这一血液样本是从刚果埃博拉附近一种流行病患者体内采集的。这位患者是在刚果工作的一位比利时修女,她感染上了一种奇怪的病,并被诊断为疑似黄热病。她尽管接种了全部疫苗,最终还是死亡了。病毒学家通过显微镜照片看到,这种病毒呈长丝状体、像虫子一样结构,和黄热病病毒完全不同,而与马尔堡病毒类似。马尔堡病毒是德国学者在1967年秋发现的新病毒,一些药厂工人被出口自乌干达的一批猴子传 The Ebola virus has drawn the attention of scientists since September 29, 1976. On that day, a microbiology laboratory in Antwerp, Belgium, received a blood sample package from the African country, the DRC, collected from a pandemic close to Ebola in the Congo. The patient, a Belgian nuns working in the Congo, was infected with a strange disease and was diagnosed with suspected yellow fever. Despite her vaccination, she eventually died. Virologists have seen through microscopic photographs that the virus is a filamentous, worm-like structure that is completely different from the yellow fever virus and similar to the Marburg virus. The Marburg virus was a new virus discovered by German scholars in the autumn of 1967 and some pharmaceutical workers were exported to Uganda by a group of monkeys