How Pauline Cafferkey's Ebola relapse tears up everything doctors thought they knew

Doctors and scientists are amazed and appalled at the Scottish nurse's relapse, which has worrying implications for the thousands of survivors in west Africa

Since 1976, when the Ebola virus was first identified, doctors racing to remote villages in African forests have thought they had a reasonable idea of what those infected were facing. The disease was grim - a hemorrhagic fever which caused copious bleeding and often death - but some people could and did fully recover. Now that is in question.

When nurse Pauline Cafferkey was admitted back into the infectious diseases unit of the Royal Free hospital in London on 9 October, nine months after recovering from Ebola, and then became critically ill, all the previous assumptions about the long-term effects of this virus had to be torn up.