New York: Tweets regarding the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 reached more than 60 million people in the three days before the official outbreak announcements, a new study has found.

Researchers from the Columbia University School of Nursing in New York analysed over 42,000 Ebola-related tweets posted to the social networking site Twitter, from July 24 to August 1, 2014, the week in which Nigeria reported the first case of Ebola, Sierra Leone declared a national state of emergency and the first American was diagnosed with Ebola.