The strain of Ebola virus that infected two monkeys brought recently from the Philippines to a Texas primate center is virtually identical to the one that killed more than a dozen animals but caused no human disease in an outbreak outside Washington seven years ago.

Named "Ebola-Reston" after the Virginia suburb where the first cases were found, the virus behaves quite differently from the African strain of Ebola, which readily infects people and has a mortality rate between 50 percent and 80 percent. There is no treatment for the infection. Eight people at the remote animal quarantine unit in Texas have had contact with the two infected animals.

Ebola virus infection was confirmed last weekend, when scientists at the CDC isolated and characterized the virus in blood and tissue samples from two monkeys. Preliminary tests show that the virus's genetic sequence is "much more than 90 percent" identical with the Reston strain, said Stephen Ostroff, an epidemiologist at the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases.