CDC

The CDC Is Using Twitter to Explain Ebola for the Second Time in Two Months

And people have just as many questions about the virus as they did during August's online chat.

 Two months ago, when U.S. health officials first took to Twitter to explain Ebola, the virus had killed just under 800 people in West Africa.

Now, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hosts its second online chat about the virus, the outbreak in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea has claimed 3,865 lives. That number includes Thomas Eric Duncan, a 42-year-old man who died of Ebola in Texas on Wednesday morning. Duncan, who arrived in Dallas more than two weeks ago from Liberia, was the first person to be diagnosed with the disease on American soil.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that people who fly into five major American airports from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea will be screened for fever, one of the first symptoms of Ebola. 

On Wednesday afternoon, as they did back in August, the tweets started pouring in. Here's a sampling of the Internet's questions for @CDCgov and its affiliate Twitter accounts, streamlined under #CDCChat. Follow the whole thing here.

Many users wondered whether an Ebola epidemic is possible in the U.S.:

Others got a little more specific:

There is no cure or vaccine for Ebola, and doctors are not sure exactly how experimental drugs have cured some people of the disease, which has some asking:

One user's inquiry was especially timely. On Wednesday, Spanish authorities euthanizedExcalibur, the pet dog of a nurse who contracted Ebola this week, despite crowd-sourced efforts to spare his life.

And some users, well, took the Twitter chat less seriously than others:

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