As reported in the weekly magazine Newsweek (5): "When a 36-year-old lab technician known as Kinfumu checked into the general hospital in Kikwit, Zaire, last month, complaining of diarrhea and a fever, anyone could have mistaken his illness for the dysentery that was plaguing the city. Nurses, doctors and nuns did what they could to help the young man. They soon saw that his disease wasn’t just dysentery. Blood began oozing from every orifice in his body. Within four days he was dead. By then the illness had all but liquefied his internal organs."

Specimens were collected and forwarded via the Belgian Embassy to the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp for evaluation. But they could not be tested there for diagnosis of Ebola because that institute no longer had the appropriate containment laboratory for such studies. In Belgium, as elsewhere including the United States, short-term political considerations had reduced funding for surveillance as well as research into infectious diseases. The samples then traveled from Antwerp to the Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta, Georgia, where tests proved that most of the patients were infected with Ebola virus.

One such family quarantined in England was front-page news. The quarantine lasted until blood samples could be obtained and analyzed to show that they were not carriers of the Ebola virus.

"Ebola virus can spread either through the air or by exposure to contaminated blood of infected humans."

"Within the immune system, infection settles in dendritic cells, monocytes, and macrophages." As to the source of this virus, the fruit bat (1,7) was recently identified as its first-known nonhuman vector. Unanticipated outbreaks of Ebola continue. A total of sixty cases with forty-five deaths (fatality rate 75 percent) occurred in Gabon between mid-July 1996 and January 1997. As recently as August 2007, reports from the southeastern Congo documented 217 people who were afflicted with the virus, of whom 103 have died (fatality rate of 47 percent).

The infection caused by airborne Ebola virus was from cynomologous monkeys brought from the Philippines (6). Of the 161 monkeys imported, more than half died over a two-and-a-halfmonth period. Luckily, and for unknown reasons, the virus failed to spread to other humans, even though the airborne route of transmission was available. Ebola virus remains endemic in parts of Africa. Of over 5,000 blood samples collected from individuals in central Africa, nearly a quarter (25 percent) tested positive for prior infection with Ebola. These human responses to Ebola are reminiscent of events in the past associated with outbreaks of yellow fever and polio.