Actually there are over 100 strains of cold viruses, many of which were completely sequenced and reported in a paper in Science last year. But as to why this g

Actually there are over 100 strains of cold viruses, many of which were completely sequenced and reported in a paper in Science last year. But as to why this group of scientists chose Ebola: they have been working on Ebola for over 20 years, so they made that choice long ago. Every human virus has a scientific community of experts who study it.