Remember the rash of biologists that died in mysterious ways right before the war in Iraq? That was post SARS, pre-Marburg.
Once the cave was discovered as the source of Ebola, and elephants as the reservoir, China has Ebola.
H5N1 and this strain of Ebola have a noticeable discontinuity in their sequencing, according to the source article. That says to me "splicing".
You are obviously trained in this field - I'm certainly not - so I'd appreciate your educated opinion: Is this "new" strain natural or manmade?
It's been proven to be spliced?
I am not an expert, just an educated observer.
I find it improbable that someone would splice an Ebola type virus into an Influenza type virus for a few reasons. First is simply that these two viruses are significantly different, though of the same broad class of viruses (neg RNA). Ebola has fairly stable and simple RNA, while influenza has complicated segmented RNA that mixes things up regularly. On the surface, it seems difficult to splice the interesting parts between the two in a way that would actually function due to the basic structural and organizational differences. It would be a bit like trying to run old mainframe binaries on a Macintosh. And even if it is possible, would the Chinese have the savvy to pull it off?
A much easier and cheaper approach is to splice from within one of the virus sub-families, which is more analogous to trying to make software run that is written for two very different operating systems but the same underlying hardware. Still a pain, but much easier. And in fact, a lot of state-of-the-art virus engineering works more along these lines.
You might be able to splice a very specific little bit of influenza into ebola, but probably not the other way around. I do not know enough about the details of these virus families to say why you might want to do that as opposed to engineering a virus to some end in another fashion.