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The question of "will Ebola become airborne" is academically interesting, but not particularly relevant. The virus spreads just fine with its current mechanism:
by 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.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y agoI don't think the issue is whether mutation might make it work more efficiently, but the probability that this might happen. To estimate that you need to understand the precise mechanisms of variability, and the likelihood that the genetic elements that create Ebola symptoms could combine with the genetic elements that make influenza and rhinoviruses so infectious. Obviously there's no teleology in mutation. But as infected populations increase, so does the possibility of dangerous recombination. How much it increases, and whether we're talking about lottery odds, poker odds, or coin toss odds, is something only virologists know. But apparently there's a second order health problem. You don't just want to minimise the spread for obvious practical reasons - you also want to minimise it because the bigger the infected population, the bigger the risk of dangerous mutation.
- JimboOmega 12y agoWhat really makes it "not particularly relevant" is the articles that have said it's just not that likely to hop an international flight and show up in the US. Which is what people really care about. Is that all it takes, one infected person to get on a plane? Or is this really going to be a West African problem - a terrible one, maybe, but it still has way fewer casualties than the civil wars that are all too common in the area. It's one thing for a doctor to say that we're losing the chance to contain this thing, if we don't commit more resources... It'd be another to have them offer a timeline where it starts to impact Europe or the Americas.
- davesque 12y agoIt _is_ rather frightening to imagine all the invisible ways this virus could spread if it makes it over to a major city in the states. However, my understanding is that usually, within only a few days of expressing symptoms such as fever, vomiting, etc., patients are on their death bed if their immune system hasn't kicked in. This makes it seem less likely that someone will return to work one or two days after first coming down with a fever due to Ebola.