They found evidence suggesting that the medical outcome for an individual patient—to survive and recover, or to die—might be related not to the size of the infectious dose of Ebola virus but to whether the patient’s blood cells produced antibodies promptly in response to infection. If they didn’t, why not? Was it because the virus itself somehow quickly decommissioned their immune systems, interrupting the normal sequence of molecular interactions involved in antibody production? Does the virus kill people (as is now widely supposed) by creating immune dysfunction before overwhelming them with
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