Ebola News Regarding Wortham's Kindergarteners Infected is False, Angry Reactions

October 21, 2014 12:31 PM EST

False news regarding the invasion by the Ebola virus in Wortham, Texas, was attacked by furious reactants, according to Snopes.com.



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Registered nurses from the University of Texas Medical Branch are on hand to greet passengers and answer questions as the Carnival Magic cruise ship docks in Galveston, Texas October 19, 2014. The Carnival Magic arrived on Sunday after a week-long trip with a Dallas hospital lab worker on board who spent much of the cruise in isolation after possible exposure to Ebola.

National Report, which publishes false news that is sensational and made up, had said that the unused wing of a retirement area in Wortham became a temporary Ebola ward. They had "reported" that when 17 kindergarten students fell ill, they tested positive for the virus after getting exposed to the disease when they shared classrooms with a Liberian foreign exchange student.

The girl was said to have recently come to spend a year with an American family after her parents had got displaced during the war.

Two weeks after she came and tested positive for Ebola, she seems to have transmitted the virus to the others, according to National Report.

Wortham ISD Superintendent, David Allen, was disgusted at the false news. He said that they had gotten 30 calls related to the scare. If you take away time from someone doing their work, you are snatching away "productive time," he said. It took him back and made him wonder why people put up such things that were not even humourous, according toThe Mexia News.

National Report also said that Lindsay Belknap was a temporary teacher, who was in class at the time when they got infected, and was also hospitalized at a local but unknown place. She was quoted as saying, "It was like a domino effect" because one after the other all the children were infected. To fight the false news, Wortham ISD put some processes in place so that they could keep parents informed in case of a real emergency, Allen noted.

The National Report website has the look and feel of a genuine News website, with a layout that resembles Huffington Post. But the stories elicited angry reactions from readers, who believed it for a while. It was shared on Facebook by 7,442 people as of noon yesterday, having only been posted five hours prior. Just last week, the site claimed the entire town of Purdon, in Navarro County, was quarantined due to Ebola, the town ringed by medical and law enforcement personnel. Apparently, the Ebola virus attacks in more ways than one!

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/57018...false-news.htm