Both viruses, and some of their lesser known relatives, cause severe disease in humans and nonhuman primates in the form of viral hemorrhagic fevers.

[13] The name Filoviridae is derived from the Latin noun filum (alluding to the filamentous morphology of filovirions) and the taxonomic suffix -viridae (which denotes a virus family).

The most abundant protein produced is the nucleoprotein, whose concentration in the cell determines when the RdRp switches from gene transcription to genome replication.

Replication results in full-length, positive-stranded antigenomes that are in turn transcribed into negative-stranded virus progeny genome copies.

[20] Paleoviruses that appear to be derived from filovirus-like viruses have been identified in the genomes of many small-bodied species including bats, rodents, shrews, tenrecs, tarsiers,marsupials[21][22][23] and fishes.

[24] Although most filovirus-like elements appear to be pseudogenes, evolutionary and structural analyses suggest that orthologs isolated from several species of the bat genus Myotis and the rodent family Spalacidae have been maintained by selection.

[32] The Department of Homeland Security’s National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center considers the risk of a mutated Ebola virus strain with aerosol transmission capability emerging in the future as a serious threat to national security and has collaborated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to design methods to detect EBOV aerosols.