Photos : See What happens When You Are Infected With The Ebola Virus, From Symptoms Of A Common Cold To Bleeding Out The Ears And Eyes

If you have a temperature and no appetite. Your head is aching and you're throat is sore. It may appear as though a common cold is lurking, but unbeknownst to you the vicious Ebola virus has started to attack your immune system.

The virus destroys the same cells as those targeted by HIV, though the Ebola infection is more aggressive, wiping out the building blocks of the body's immune system. It has an incubation period - that is the time from infection to when the first symptoms present themselves - of between two and 21 days, increasing the risk of the highly-infectious illness spreading.

A rising temperature, headache and sore throat are the first signs the Ebola virus is invading the body, attacking the building blocks of the immune system. As the disease progresses, victims suffer blood shot eyes, as tiny blood vessels burst, causing bleeding from the eyes, ears, mouth, and other orifices

Where a victim has breaks in the skin, blood seeps out, as the disease takes hold. The virus has a death rate of up to 90 per cent, and is highly-contagious, spreading through contact with an infected person's blood, secretions, organs and other bodily fluids

As soon as a victim starts to suffer the sudden onset of the disease, the fever, crippling headache and muscle pain, they are already contagious. The virus is transmitted through close contact with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected animals.

Once a human is infected, the disease can spread quickly within a community, with health workers and family members of victims at particular risk.

The current outbreak rampaging through West Africa, began in a small village in Guinea and since February it has claimed 672 lives, leaving another 1,200 people infected.

It has spread into neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia.

And on Friday, U.S. citizen Patrick Sawyer died in the Nigerian capital of Lagos, having travelled there by plane after attending his sister's funeral, after she too died of the disease.

This is now the most prolific Ebola outbreak since the disease was first discovered in 1976.

The fact the virus mimics the symptoms of a common cold in its early stages, is the very aspect that makes the disease so difficult to diagnose.

Within a few days, the early symptoms give way to the next stage of the virus.

Disseminated intravascular coagulation causes clots and hemorrhaging, with clots in the liver, spleen, brain and other internal organs.

The virus pierces veins and capillaries, forcing the blood vessels to bleed into the surrounding tissue.

A patient will suffer aches all over the body, chronic abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhoea.

Patrick Sawyer, 40, from the U.S. died in the Nigerian capital of Lagos on Friday. He collapsed after getting off a flight from Liberia on July 20 and was isolated at a hospital in the city