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Already 10 other flare-ups have taken place in areas where the spread of Ebola was thought to have ended, raising new questions about WHO procedures in assessing whether an epidemic was really over.

the woman was not buried safely because local health workers had not identified her as a suspected Ebola case. That raises the possibility there could be a wider Ebola outbreak.

In short, he Canadian government not only sold off commercial rights to its Ebola vaccine to a for-profit firm at sale-price rates. It also paid the lion’s share of costs required to test the vaccine for human use.

“Usually, an individual is not sick for three to five days after the onset of symptoms, which will fool you,” Dr. Ribner said. “You say, ‘Oh, you’re not going to be that sick.’ Then, around Day 5 to 7, they really crash. Their blood pressure goes down, they become stuporous to unresponsive, and they start to have renal and liver failure. This correlates with the enormous viral load, which is just attacking every organ in the body.”

A concern for health workers is that as patients grow sicker, the levels of virus in their blood rise and they become more and more contagious. The researchers at Emory tested patients and found high levels of the virus in their body fluids and even on their skin.At the peak of illness, an Ebola patient can have 10 billion viral particles in one-fifth of a teaspoon of blood. That compares with 50,000 to 100,000 particles in an untreated H.I.V. patient, and five million to 20 million in someone with untreated hepatitis C.

“That helped us to understand why, if this is only spread by body fluids, why it is more contagious than hepatitis A, B and C, and H.I.V.,” Dr. Ribner said. “It’s just that there’s so much more virus in the fluids they put out.”