Knowledge on Ebola is a test that students are failing.

Fox News reports.

College students still largely misinformed about Ebola

Months after the Ebola virus outbreak of 2014 had briefly the U.S., American college students still understood little about the disease and how it spreads, a 2015 survey suggests.

“I was particularly surprised that almost a third thought you could get Ebola from mosquitoes, but this belief has also been echoed in the HIV literature,” said Brandon Brown of the University of California Riverside School of Medicine, who coauthored a report about the survey in the American Journal of Infection Control.

Most students got less than half of the survey questions correct, Brown told Reuters Health by email.

The students should have known that Ebola is only spread through direct contact with blood and body fluids and that you cannot get it via air, water or food, he said.

Between February and April of 2015, Brown and Thrissia Koralek of UC Irvine questioned 514 Irvine students using online surveys. The 24 questions – mostly true or false – dealt with students’ knowledge of symptoms and disease transmission, and their attitudes toward the disease and beliefs concerning the government’s involvement in the Fall 2014 outbreak.

The students were primarily female and 21 years old, on average.