ALICE, Texas - The strain of Ebola virus responsible for the deaths of two monkeys poses virtually no threat to humans, health officials said yesterday in an attempt to reassure the public.

''This is not the Ebola Zaire strain,'' Texas Department of Health Commissioner Dr. David Smith said, referring to the strain blamed for the deaths of hundreds in central Africa.

''So everything you've seen on television and everything you've seen in the movies or read in the book 'The Hot Zone,' this is a sub-type, a different type of virus,'' Smith said at yesterday's news conference.

The best-selling ''Hot Zone'' a nonfiction work, detailed research on Ebola Zaire and the case of a similar strain that infected monkeys at a primate facility in Reston, Va., in 1989.

Ebola Reston, however, has not been linked to illness in humans. And the virus at a primate center outside Alice is 99 percent similar to Ebola Reston, said Dr. Pierre Rollin, chief of the special pathogens branch at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

''Nobody's sick. There's not a big outbreak of something,'' Rollin said.

The virus infected two monkeys of a shipment of 100 that arrived at the Texas Primate Center on March 21 from the Philippines, said Dr. Diane Simpson, an epidemiologist at the Texas Department of Health.

The privately owned primate breeding facility is about 15 miles southeast of Alice, a South Texas town 40 miles west of Corpus Christi.

''The first one died; the second was euthanized,'' Simpson said, adding that the rest are under quarantine. ''We're watching any people who may have come in contact with them.''

The sick monkeys came from the same Filipino exporter as the infected monkeys in Reston, officials said.

Last year in Zaire, Ebola infected 316 people and killed 245. Earlier this year, at least 13 people died from Ebola in Gabon in western Africa.

Ebola Zaire is one of the world's deadliest diseases, causing 80 percent of its victims to bleed to death. It is spread through bodily fluids, commonly through a break in the skin. It has no treatment and no cure.