Experts say Ebola might be quietly inoculating a significant portion of the population—people who are exposed to the virus but never succumb to it or show symptoms of infection.
If those individuals have acquired an immunity to Ebola, the strategies for the intervention and treatment of the disease need to be reconsidered, according to the letter published online yesterday in The Lancet.

“We might not have to wait until we have a vaccine to use immune individuals to reduce the spread of disease.”

“If infection without disease protects people from future Ebola infections and illness, the epidemic should decline sooner than currently predicted and affect a smaller number of people,” says Juliet Pulliam, one of the letter’s authors and an assistant professor of biology at the University of Florida and its Emerging Pathogens Institute.
The authors, led by postdoctoral fellow Steve Bellan at the University of Texas at Austin, looked at studies done in the aftermath of an outbreak.

http://www.futurity.org/ebola-virus-immunity-783442/