One factor making the hunt for Ebola’s reservoir especially difficult, especially hard to focus, is the transitory nature of the disease within human populations. It disappears entirely for years at a time. This is a mercy for public health but a constraint for science. Viral ecologists can look for Ebola anywhere, in any creature of any species, in any African forest, but those are big haystacks and the viral needle is small. The most promising search targets, in space and in time, are wherever and whenever people are dying of Ebola virus disease. And for a long interlude, no one was dying of
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