GENEVA (Reuters) – Guinea’s current Ebola outbreak is likely to have been sparked by a latent infection in the human population rather than from the virus jumping the species barrier again, a World Health Organization official said on Friday.

The WHO’s top emergencies official Mike Ryan told a briefing the preliminary finding based on initial genetic sequencing was “remarkable”.

A second WHO official at the same briefing said it was too early to draw conclusions on the source of the outbreak, the West African country’s first since a 2013-2016 epidemic that spread in the region and killed thousands.