In December 2014, approximately six months after the Sierra Leonean government announced the presence of the Ebola virus in the country, journalist and Pan-African political activist Chernoh Bah set out on a three-month journey across West Africa to investigate how the virus, which scientists claimed originated in a small village in Guinea, had evolved into an international crisis. Bah shares the findings of this study in his new book, The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals, and Rogue Politicians.

The author contends that any understanding of the Ebola crisis must first grapple with the complex history of medical experimentation and exploitation on the continent, and with questionable scientific claims about the presumed origins and spread of the outbreak — in particular the so-called zoonotic transmission thesis.

A December 2014 study by a group of German scientists — the findings of which were quickly circulated and repeated worldwide — asserted that the hunting and consumption of wild animals had contributed to the emergence of Ebola in West Africa earlier that year. The scientists based their theory on the supposedly similar circumstances of the 1970s outbreak in Central Africa.