Wave-Like Spread of Ebola Zaire?

A new paper in PLoS by Walsh, Biek, and Real provides pretty good evidence that Ebola Zaire is spreading through Central Africa in a wave-like fashion. However, it is too premature to assume that this "wave" is driven by gorilla-gorilla contact. Gorillas are clearly not the reservoir - they suffer too much mortality for the virus to be maintained in gorilla populations. Insufficient sampling of wild populations has been done to identify the reservoir species for Ebola: the virus may be spreading in a wave-like fashion through any number of species, and outbreaks in great apes and humans are still likely the result of a spill-over from another mammalian host.

Damien