Yambuku

The first began around June in southern Sudan in the towns of Nizara and Maridi.

The second began in late August in Zaire, which today we call the Congo, near a Catholic mission hospital in a place called Yambuku.

Scientists would later discover that these were two different yet similar viruses.

But that summer, nobody knew.

In some villages, huts were burned.

Patients, delirious and terrified, wandered away from the hospital, no longer able to recognize their own relatives.

On September 15, Dr. Noy Mushola, the medical director for the region, made a hard trek of about 50 miles through the rainforest to reach Yambuku.

What he found shocked him.

Between June and December 1976, 284 people contracted the mystery illness, and of those, 151 died.

A second outbreak occurred almost simultaneously, roughly 1,000 kilometers away, in the small rural village of Yambuku in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

On August 26, 1976, the school's headmaster, Mbolo Lekila, began displaying peculiar symptoms.

He was said to have recently returned from northern Zaire, close to the border of the Central African Republic, where he spent time close to a river between the 12th and the 22nd of August.