Ok, so the CDC has confirmed..and other things!

[Vampire Junction]

On Sun, 14 May 1995, chatski carl wrote:

> Additionally there is no known natural host.  This suggests to me that
> the virus only resides in the Lab, and was deliberately spread
> -- 
> - Carl

I would have to disagree. I don't believe anyone would be *that* stupid, 
since there really is no way to control how or to whom this is spread.
As far as a natural host, Richard Preston had a theory that the natural 
"host" for Ebola was some cave, since one of the index cases had cut 
himself in said cave and very soon after had gotten sick.  Maybe it's 
true, maybe it starts of as a harmess virus and mutates while in the host 
to become deadly.  I'm not a virologist or anything, but I can hypothesize.
As I said, maybe it starts off harmless, then once in a host it begins to 
mutate.  Normally it would take a while, but say it gets into a large 
colony of monkeys, one would think it would mutate faster, the more hosts 
it could find.  It becomes deadly to them and starts to kill them off, 
then mutates past that point where it also becomes deadly to humans.  
Maybe even after that it mutates again to where it only deadly to monkeys 
again.  Maybe there is only one small period of time where humans can 
contract it and become sick with it.  The theory supports the Ebola 
Reston outbreak, where only monkeys died from it, and while humans didn't 
become ill, they did show antibodies showing they *were* exposed to it.
Wither Ebola Reston had not yet become infectious to humans or it had 
already passed that point.
	As far as this outbreak being almost the same strain as the '76 
one, if there was some centralized "pool" of this virus somewhere, it 
could maybe explain why the strains or so very similar.  Maybe after each 
outbreak, the virus kills off all it's hosts, dies out of the general 
human/simian population and then has to go back to square one  waiting 
for another simian to pass by the "pool" and get infected, where it 
starts it mutations all over again.  Hence, the virus strain now being 
almost identical to the '76 strain.

Now, I've said that I'm not a virologist, just an avid reader, and these 
are just my own personal, little theories, so please don't flame me if 
I've misunderstood how the virus works.

---Candy

"A vampire lives in a constant state of desire and disgust.  His nature 
often revolts him but he doesn't have the will to deny his indulgences.  
There's the killing, but there's also the pleasure, the sensuality, the 
lust, the sheer ecstasy of it all."
                            "Stranger than Fiction" ---Forever Knight