Three other studies published in 1986 documented Ebola antibody prevalence rates of 10.6, 13.4 and 14 percent, respectively, in northwestern Liberia, not far from its borders with Sierra Leone and Guinea. These articles, along with other forgotten reports from the 1980s on antibody prevalence in neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea, suggest the possibility of what some call “sanctuary sites,” or persistent, if latent, Ebola infection in humans.

There is an adage in public health: “The road to inaction is paved with research papers.” In a twist of fate, the same laboratory that confirmed the first positive Ebola test results in Guinea last year, the Pasteur Institute, was the publisher of Annals of Virology. Yet the institute’s April 2014 report said, “This subregion was not considered to be an area in which EBOV was endemic” (using the medical term for the Ebola virus).

Part of the problem is that none of these articles were co-written by a Liberian scientist. The investigators collected their samples, returned home and published the startling results in European medical journals. Few Liberians were then trained in laboratory or epidemiological methods. Even today, downloading one of the papers would cost a physician here $45, about half a week’s salary.

The story is not an unusual one. As it happened, the subjects in the 1986 antibody studies worked on the world’s largest rubber plantation (which then supplied 40 percent of the latex used in the United States). During the current outbreak of Ebola, we saw rubber trees stretch as far as the eye could see from clinics in rural Margibi County — clinics shuttered after nurses died after supplies of latex gloves and other protective gear ran out. The way this part of Liberia was trawled for vital medical knowledge thus mirrored the way the West extracted the rubber it needed.

Sierra Leone’s and Liberia’s recent histories of civil conflict made it difficult to confirm an outbreak of the disease. Public health laboratories were not functioning in either country; it was months before Ebola was identified as the culprit pathogen. That made it impossible for the region’s few doctors and nurses to deliver effective care.