The flow cytometry analysis indicated that in the patients with EVD, who went on to have a fatal outcome, they displayed low frequencies of circulating CD14+ classic monocytes in peripheral blood (Fig. 5d and Additional file 6) compared not only with surviving patients, but also with patients with other acute infectious diseases including malaria (Fig. 4d), consistent with the predictions from the DCQ analysis. Here, CD14 is linked to malaria.