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For HIV-1, the term latency was initially used in the clinical sense to describe the long asymptomatic period between initial infection and the development of AIDS. However, with the advent of sensitive RT-PCR assays for viremia (Piatak et al. 1993), it became clear that HIV-1 replicates actively throughout the course of the infection, even during the asymptomatic period. The major mechanism by which HIV-1 evades immune responses is not latency but rather through rapid evolution of escape mutations that abrogate recognition by neutralizing antibodies and cytolytic T lymphocytes (Bailey et al. 2004). Nevertheless, it has become clear that HIV-1 can establish a state of latent infection at the level of individual T cells

The first possibility is that the Ebola virus spreads from West Africa to megacities in other regions of the developing world.

The second possibility is one that virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air.

The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.