6 ms·

Will the Ebola virus go airborne?

65 points by etiam 12y ago

ph0rque 12y ago
> Will the Ebola virus go airborne? > Experts say the possibility remains remote. Seems like the article is acknowledging Betteridge's Law of Headlines in the subtitle. Very convenient!
- fasteo 12y ago
  Just for reference (I did not know about it) Betteridge's Law: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
  - ilitirit 12y ago
    "Betteridge's observation of some headlines that end in question marks" This "law" fails many tabloid-style headlines, and other obvious cases. eg. "Where's the money?" (headline about corruption involving tax-payer money) "Is Betteridge's Law of headlines ever worth invoking?" "Manchester United: Will they ever return to form?"
- delecti 12y ago
  Betteridge's Law of Headlines should really be referenced more often with clickbaity titles like this.
  - twoodfin 12y ago
    I wish either the title requirements or HN users with sufficient karma could allow/add a @SavedYouAClick-style tag to these stories that would list on the front page ("Will the Ebola Virus Go Airborne? [Probably Not]"), rather than having the Betteridge's Law of Headlines discussion in every such thread.
    - delecti 12y ago
      Agreed, that would be even better still.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Someone was collecting all the times it got references on HN. It was useful the first few times, after that it became a race to see who could post "FRIST", er, "BETTERIDGE" in each comment section.
  - nether 12y ago
    Really? It's a pretty standard HN circlejerk to mention it. That and correlation vs causation, and "submarine" articles. I think Betteridge's Law is mentioned more than enough, considering how often it fails.
themgt 12y ago
I really see the strong, immediate pushback against this idea as mainly an attempt to calm the lay audience. Ebola has been airborne in other species before, and it's very nearly airborne in humans - this is certainly not a virus like HIV where even unprotected sexual intercourse has a low infection rate - we've got a huge number of infected doctors and healthcare workers, and there are calls for this to be treated like SARS: "Infection control concerning EVD is not working, especially when more than 240 [now 300] healthcare personnel have been infected, and more than 120 workers have died. Guidelines used to control SARS in 2003 should be used, not "contact and droplet protection of 1-2 meters," as is still recommended by WHO. Personal protective equipment (PPE) for contact and airborne infections should be used because of a) respiratory symptoms, b) a big distance -- up to 9 meters -- for droplets when coughing and sneezing (Bourouiba et al. J Fluid Mechanics 2014;745:537-563.), c) re-aerolization from the environment, bed clothes etc., d) long survival of the virus outside the body, and e) high lethality. Healthcare workers (HCW) and helpers should be protected with PPE as they were during the SARS epidemic." http://www.promedmail.org/direct.php?id=20140914.2773490 http://www.promedmail.org/direct.php?id=20140914.2773490 The real question is more like, will Ebola mutate to be more airborne than it already is?
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > I really see the strong, immediate pushback against this idea as mainly an attempt to calm the lay audience. Little off-topic, but reminds me of something I read once - if the government tells you to panic, it's probably nothing important and will blow over soon. When they tell you to keep calm and carry on, then it's probably the time to be really worried.
  - gugachiu 12y ago
    It's an interesting statement but if taken at its face value, we should have all been a lot more worried about December 21st, 2012 and the Mayan Calendar ending.
    - cordite 12y ago
      Maybe the Y2K hype softened most of those who would react.
chestnut-tree 12y ago
I mentioned this in a previous discussion on Ebola, but thought it might be worth repeating. Last week, the BBC broadcast a generally informative documentary about Ebola. The programme talks to survivors of the virus, to the staff of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treating victims, to Peter Piot, the Belgian doctor who discovered the virus (and established that the disease was not airborne) and the medical staff seeking a cure. There are some harrowing scenes. For UK viewers, it's available on iPlayer until Friday 19 Sept. 2014 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04hcthj/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04hcthj/ For everyone else, someone's uploaded it to YouTube, although the last 10 minutes are missing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjuQofIleOg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjuQofIleOg
nilved 12y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
imacomputer2 12y ago
Great article. Isn't it obviously that Ebola or any other deadly virus is unlikely to become highly contagious via air simply because we don't see mass airbourn infections very often. (Do we ever see them?) If such mutations were likely, then we would see them. Massive plagues, wiping out something like %50 of the population would be common. There have been mass plagues in history of course, however, they are somewhat rare and often the result of poor sanitation. That's not as much of a problem in the modern world, although the third world still struggles with it. Worse yet, if airborn mutations were likely, then we would probably not see them at all, because evolution would not have brought about highly complex creatures. We would always get killed off by disease before making that far.
- nyan_sandwich 12y ago
  The flaw in this is that our mobility and density is unprecedented, so things that were not feasible for a startup plague in the past may now be feasible.
- TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
  There are selection pressures against infections that kill the host. That may explain why highly quickly-lethal viruses are rare.
  - rectangletangle 12y ago
    This is generally true, though occasionally parasitoid relationships are selected for (where there's a fitness advantage to killing off the host). Though these relationships typically only occur with an r selected host (many offspring, low probability of survival). Thankfully however humans are very heavily K selected (few offspring, high probability of survival).
- Havoc 12y ago
  >>we don't see mass airbourn infections very often. Flu?
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
trhway 12y ago
as it is already infectious on the infected fluid contact, it just need to learn to hitch a ride in a micro-drops of fluid people breath out (like the flu virus, though in case of flu the virus learned to make people cough - it helps to shoot the micro-drops out)
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Are risks ever downplayed due to question marks in headlines? Have we reached Peak-Betteridge? Will we be following on after this with the weather?
davesque 12y ago
This article, as well as the nytimes.com op-ed piece, misquote/misinterpret the 2012 Canadian study that supposedly showed transmission from pigs to monkeys via air. From the text of the study: "Under conditions of the current study, transmission of ZEBOV could have occurred either by inhalation (of aerosol or larger droplets), and/or droplet inoculation of eyes and mucosal surfaces and/or by fomites due to droplets generated during the cleaning of the room." Also from the study: "The experimental setting of the present study could not quantify the relative contribution of aerosol, small and large droplets in the air, and droplets landing inside the NHP cages (fomites) to EBOV transmission between pigs and macaques. These parameters will need to be investigated using an experimental approach specifically designed to address this question." People need to be careful about how they read these academic articles. The authors of the two aforementioned news articles misinterpreted the findings of the study in a way that supports their personal viewpoints. I do agree that this issue needs attention, but not misinformation. Link to actual study: http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00811/full/srep00811.html http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00811/full/srep00...
lukasm 12y ago
> In fact, there’s almost no historical precedent for any virus to change its basic mode of transmission so radically. almost no meaning "just" smallpox?
- rectangletangle 12y ago
  I suspect that this conclusion has more to do with lack of data, than what's actually occurring in nature. Although we've made a lot of progress over the last two hundred or so years in biology, there're still plenty of things that remain unknown.
TheCapn 12y ago
Often these types of articles go in one ear and out the other of people with irrational fear of the unknown or are incapable of understanding the way a researcher might discuss the topic. I feel this is often the case simply because those spreading misinformation love to use very charged words that incite a lot of emotion while those in authority to speak on the subject use terms with strong meaning in science but have much less impact in regular speech. This is a good example. The article's quotes use plenty of words like "remote chance" or "highly unlikely" which don't seem to drive home the point that its "so nearly close to impossible its not worth humoring". Meanwhile, New York Time's publishes an article read my many more viewers with comparisons to the Plague, using terms like "hyper-evolution" and really ridiculous comparisons that are just taken out of context for the sake of fear. Its no wonder you get such "stupid" responses on news article comments, the entire thing is written to rile up readers and get an emotional response while hiding the actual science. Heck, even reading the two articles side by side you get very different stories of the same event (regarding the Ebola lab tests between Pigs/Monkeys in 2012). On NYTimes they indicate that Pig -> Monkey transference was possible then the Monkeys all had to be euthanized to "contain the outbreak". Meanwhile SA article states that the virus was never capable of going Monkey -> Monkey.
timr 12y ago
The question of "will Ebola become airborne" is academically interesting, but not particularly relevant. The virus spreads just fine with its current mechanism: when you're excreting loads of virus via blood, saliva, sweat, feces and vomit, "body fluids" becomes a very effective means of transmission. I live in San Francisco, and I can't tell you the number of times I encounter "body fluids" out in public. Last night, I nearly stepped in a pile of vomit on Market Street. Imagine that the vomit was from a man who recently returned from Nigeria. He'd been coming down with flu-like symptoms, and was on his way to his minimum-wage job as a prep cook, when he felt nauseous and threw up on the sidewalk. But it's a big city, and vomit on the sidewalk isn't uncommon. Nobody notices. Over the course of several hours, dozens of people accidentally step in the vomit, getting it on their shoes. Some of those people go home, take off their shoes, and touch their face without washing their hands. The virus has now spread to unsuspecting people all over the city. Meanwhile, the prep cook is sweating over a pile of lettuce in a hot, cramped kitchen. His fever isn't helping matters, and it won't be long until he feels ill again, and visits the bathroom. He's supposed to wash his hands before returning to work, but he's not feeling well, so he doesn't do the greatest job. Back to work -- there are salads to prep! It's the start of cold and flu season, so the dozens of people infected in the last day won't think twice when they come down with a fever. They'll go to work for a few days with what they think is a cold (because most people do, these days), and spread body fluids in all the normal ways that people do: touching their faces, then shaking hands. Touching the office lunch without washing their hands. Coughing. Sweating. Throwing up in the bathroom -- how many people get sick during a workday? How many people disinfect the aftermath with bleach? It will be a week or more before anyone realizes that there are people dying across the city from what looks like a bad fever -- why would anyone suspect Ebola in the US? By the time epidemiologists become aware that there's even a problem, the virus will have spread to hundreds of random individuals in one of the most densely populated cities in the world....
- Havoc 12y ago
  >but not particularly relevant. The virus spreads just fine with its current mechanism This strikes me as a rather weak argument. Just because something "works" doesn't mean evolution/gene mutation won't find a way to make it work more "efficiently". I'm also wary of drawing parallels to anything we see in a "modern" country...sure flu etc is contagious too - beyond that they are barely comparable though.
Havoc 12y ago
At the present rate its going to be a disaster with or without airborne anyway.

65 points by etiam 12y ago

> Will the Ebola virus go airborne? > Experts say the possibility remains remote. Seems like the article is acknowledging Betteridge's Law of Headlines in the subtitle. Very convenient!

fasteo 12y ago
Just for reference (I did not know about it) Betteridge's Law: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- ilitirit 12y ago
  "Betteridge's observation of some headlines that end in question marks" This "law" fails many tabloid-style headlines, and other obvious cases. eg. "Where's the money?" (headline about corruption involving tax-payer money) "Is Betteridge's Law of headlines ever worth invoking?" "Manchester United: Will they ever return to form?"
delecti 12y ago
Betteridge's Law of Headlines should really be referenced more often with clickbaity titles like this.
- twoodfin 12y ago
  I wish either the title requirements or HN users with sufficient karma could allow/add a @SavedYouAClick-style tag to these stories that would list on the front page ("Will the Ebola Virus Go Airborne? [Probably Not]"), rather than having the Betteridge's Law of Headlines discussion in every such thread.
  - delecti 12y ago
    Agreed, that would be even better still.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Someone was collecting all the times it got references on HN. It was useful the first few times, after that it became a race to see who could post "FRIST", er, "BETTERIDGE" in each comment section.
- nether 12y ago
  Really? It's a pretty standard HN circlejerk to mention it. That and correlation vs causation, and "submarine" articles. I think Betteridge's Law is mentioned more than enough, considering how often it fails.

themgt 12y ago

I really see the strong, immediate pushback against this idea as mainly an attempt to calm the lay audience. Ebola has been airborne in other species before, and it's very nearly airborne in humans - this is certainly not a virus like HIV where even unprotected sexual intercourse has a low infection rate - we've got a huge number of infected doctors and healthcare workers, and there are calls for this to be treated like SARS: "Infection control concerning EVD is not working, especially when more than 240 [now 300] healthcare personnel have been infected, and more than 120 workers have died. Guidelines used to control SARS in 2003 should be used, not "contact and droplet protection of 1-2 meters," as is still recommended by WHO. Personal protective equipment (PPE) for contact and airborne infections should be used because of a) respiratory symptoms, b) a big distance -- up to 9 meters -- for droplets when coughing and sneezing (Bourouiba et al. J Fluid Mechanics 2014;745:537-563.), c) re-aerolization from the environment, bed clothes etc., d) long survival of the virus outside the body, and e) high lethality. Healthcare workers (HCW) and helpers should be protected with PPE as they were during the SARS epidemic." http://www.promedmail.org/direct.php?id=20140914.2773490 http://www.promedmail.org/direct.php?id=20140914.2773490 The real question is more like, will Ebola mutate to be more airborne than it already is?

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> I really see the strong, immediate pushback against this idea as mainly an attempt to calm the lay audience. Little off-topic, but reminds me of something I read once - if the government tells you to panic, it's probably nothing important and will blow over soon. When they tell you to keep calm and carry on, then it's probably the time to be really worried.
- gugachiu 12y ago
  It's an interesting statement but if taken at its face value, we should have all been a lot more worried about December 21st, 2012 and the Mayan Calendar ending.
  - cordite 12y ago
    Maybe the Y2K hype softened most of those who would react.

chestnut-tree 12y ago

I mentioned this in a previous discussion on Ebola, but thought it might be worth repeating. Last week, the BBC broadcast a generally informative documentary about Ebola. The programme talks to survivors of the virus, to the staff of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treating victims, to Peter Piot, the Belgian doctor who discovered the virus (and established that the disease was not airborne) and the medical staff seeking a cure. There are some harrowing scenes. For UK viewers, it's available on iPlayer until Friday 19 Sept. 2014 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04hcthj/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04hcthj/ For everyone else, someone's uploaded it to YouTube, although the last 10 minutes are missing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjuQofIleOg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjuQofIleOg

nilved 12y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

imacomputer2 12y ago

Great article. Isn't it obviously that Ebola or any other deadly virus is unlikely to become highly contagious via air simply because we don't see mass airbourn infections very often. (Do we ever see them?) If such mutations were likely, then we would see them. Massive plagues, wiping out something like %50 of the population would be common. There have been mass plagues in history of course, however, they are somewhat rare and often the result of poor sanitation. That's not as much of a problem in the modern world, although the third world still struggles with it. Worse yet, if airborn mutations were likely, then we would probably not see them at all, because evolution would not have brought about highly complex creatures. We would always get killed off by disease before making that far.

nyan_sandwich 12y ago
The flaw in this is that our mobility and density is unprecedented, so things that were not feasible for a startup plague in the past may now be feasible.
TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
There are selection pressures against infections that kill the host. That may explain why highly quickly-lethal viruses are rare.
- rectangletangle 12y ago
  This is generally true, though occasionally parasitoid relationships are selected for (where there's a fitness advantage to killing off the host). Though these relationships typically only occur with an r selected host (many offspring, low probability of survival). Thankfully however humans are very heavily K selected (few offspring, high probability of survival).
Havoc 12y ago
>>we don't see mass airbourn infections very often. Flu?
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

trhway 12y ago

as it is already infectious on the infected fluid contact, it just need to learn to hitch a ride in a micro-drops of fluid people breath out (like the flu virus, though in case of flu the virus learned to make people cough - it helps to shoot the micro-drops out)

lotsofmangos 12y ago

Are risks ever downplayed due to question marks in headlines? Have we reached Peak-Betteridge? Will we be following on after this with the weather?

davesque 12y ago

This article, as well as the nytimes.com op-ed piece, misquote/misinterpret the 2012 Canadian study that supposedly showed transmission from pigs to monkeys via air. From the text of the study: "Under conditions of the current study, transmission of ZEBOV could have occurred either by inhalation (of aerosol or larger droplets), and/or droplet inoculation of eyes and mucosal surfaces and/or by fomites due to droplets generated during the cleaning of the room." Also from the study: "The experimental setting of the present study could not quantify the relative contribution of aerosol, small and large droplets in the air, and droplets landing inside the NHP cages (fomites) to EBOV transmission between pigs and macaques. These parameters will need to be investigated using an experimental approach specifically designed to address this question." People need to be careful about how they read these academic articles. The authors of the two aforementioned news articles misinterpreted the findings of the study in a way that supports their personal viewpoints. I do agree that this issue needs attention, but not misinformation. Link to actual study: http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00811/full/srep00811.html http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00811/full/srep00...

lukasm 12y ago

> In fact, there’s almost no historical precedent for any virus to change its basic mode of transmission so radically. almost no meaning "just" smallpox?

rectangletangle 12y ago
I suspect that this conclusion has more to do with lack of data, than what's actually occurring in nature. Although we've made a lot of progress over the last two hundred or so years in biology, there're still plenty of things that remain unknown.

TheCapn 12y ago

Often these types of articles go in one ear and out the other of people with irrational fear of the unknown or are incapable of understanding the way a researcher might discuss the topic. I feel this is often the case simply because those spreading misinformation love to use very charged words that incite a lot of emotion while those in authority to speak on the subject use terms with strong meaning in science but have much less impact in regular speech. This is a good example. The article's quotes use plenty of words like "remote chance" or "highly unlikely" which don't seem to drive home the point that its "so nearly close to impossible its not worth humoring". Meanwhile, New York Time's publishes an article read my many more viewers with comparisons to the Plague, using terms like "hyper-evolution" and really ridiculous comparisons that are just taken out of context for the sake of fear. Its no wonder you get such "stupid" responses on news article comments, the entire thing is written to rile up readers and get an emotional response while hiding the actual science. Heck, even reading the two articles side by side you get very different stories of the same event (regarding the Ebola lab tests between Pigs/Monkeys in 2012). On NYTimes they indicate that Pig -> Monkey transference was possible then the Monkeys all had to be euthanized to "contain the outbreak". Meanwhile SA article states that the virus was never capable of going Monkey -> Monkey.

timr 12y ago

The question of "will Ebola become airborne" is academically interesting, but not particularly relevant. The virus spreads just fine with its current mechanism: when you're excreting loads of virus via blood, saliva, sweat, feces and vomit, "body fluids" becomes a very effective means of transmission. I live in San Francisco, and I can't tell you the number of times I encounter "body fluids" out in public. Last night, I nearly stepped in a pile of vomit on Market Street. Imagine that the vomit was from a man who recently returned from Nigeria. He'd been coming down with flu-like symptoms, and was on his way to his minimum-wage job as a prep cook, when he felt nauseous and threw up on the sidewalk. But it's a big city, and vomit on the sidewalk isn't uncommon. Nobody notices. Over the course of several hours, dozens of people accidentally step in the vomit, getting it on their shoes. Some of those people go home, take off their shoes, and touch their face without washing their hands. The virus has now spread to unsuspecting people all over the city. Meanwhile, the prep cook is sweating over a pile of lettuce in a hot, cramped kitchen. His fever isn't helping matters, and it won't be long until he feels ill again, and visits the bathroom. He's supposed to wash his hands before returning to work, but he's not feeling well, so he doesn't do the greatest job. Back to work -- there are salads to prep! It's the start of cold and flu season, so the dozens of people infected in the last day won't think twice when they come down with a fever. They'll go to work for a few days with what they think is a cold (because most people do, these days), and spread body fluids in all the normal ways that people do: touching their faces, then shaking hands. Touching the office lunch without washing their hands. Coughing. Sweating. Throwing up in the bathroom -- how many people get sick during a workday? How many people disinfect the aftermath with bleach? It will be a week or more before anyone realizes that there are people dying across the city from what looks like a bad fever -- why would anyone suspect Ebola in the US? By the time epidemiologists become aware that there's even a problem, the virus will have spread to hundreds of random individuals in one of the most densely populated cities in the world....

Havoc 12y ago
>but not particularly relevant. The virus spreads just fine with its current mechanism This strikes me as a rather weak argument. Just because something "works" doesn't mean evolution/gene mutation won't find a way to make it work more "efficiently". I'm also wary of drawing parallels to anything we see in a "modern" country...sure flu etc is contagious too - beyond that they are barely comparable though.

Havoc 12y ago

At the present rate its going to be a disaster with or without airborne anyway.