Story Behind the Story: How Times Reporters Unraveled the Ebola Epidemic

NEW YORK TIMES                                               Jan. 2, 2015

Celia W. Dugger, deputy science editor for health, has helped to coordinate the Times’s coverage of Ebola. She edited a feature published Tuesday on the origin of this year’s Ebola outbreak, and shares how the story came together after months of reporting.

As the Ebola epidemic gained velocity this fall, spreading fear and death across one of the world’s poorest regions, I kept coming back to the same questions: How did this one get away? How did the experts — and the media, including editors like me, for that matter — miss the signs in the spring that this time would be catastrophically different from the nearly two dozen prior outbreaks? Why did the most seasoned Ebola hands — men and women who had repeatedly risked their lives battling this lethal foe — let their guard down and scale back in May just when the virus might have been throttled?

A team of New York Times reporters spent the past two months trying to answer those questions and to gather facts for a first draft of the early history of an epidemic that began in the forests of Guinea a year ago. The result of their labors, “How Ebola Roared Back,” was published Tuesday in a special section of Science Times.

Read complete story of the investigation.
http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/01/02/how-times-reporters-unraveled-the-ebola-epidemic/?_r=1

Link to the "How Ebola Roared Back" story posted Dec. 29, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/30/health/how-ebola-roared-back.html?_r=0