What does Ebola actually do? By Kelly Servick, 13 August 2014 ||  Science/AAAS | News Behind t

What does Ebola actually do?
By Kelly Servick, 13 August 2014 ||  Science/AAAS | News

Behind the unprecedented Ebola outbreak in West Africa lies a species with an incredible power to overtake its host.

Zaire ebolavirus and the family of filoviruses to which it belongs owe their virulence to mechanisms that first disarm the immune response and then dismantle the vascular system.

The virus progresses so quickly that researchers have struggled to tease out the precise sequence of events, particularly in the midst of an outbreak. Much is still unknown, including the role of some of the seven proteins that the virus’s RNA makes by hijacking the machinery of host cells and the type of immune response necessary to defeat the virus before it spreads throughout the body. But researchers can test how the live virus attacks different cells in culture and can observe the disease’s progression in nonhuman primates—a nearly identical model to humans. 

Continue reading to find out some of the basic things we understand about how Ebola and humans interact …

IMAGE: The Ebola virus THOMAS W. GEISBERT