>>> So, unless the secretions are bloody, they are not infectious.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. See “Assessment of the Risk of Ebola Virus Transmission from Bodily Fluids and Fomites” in the Journal of Infectious diseases at
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/196/Supplement_2/S142.full
Table 1, in which various fluids of ebola patients were tested:
breast milk 100% positive
saliva 67% positive
stool (acute) 50%
tears 100%
nasal blood 100%
semen 50%
...
Admittedly, the pool size of samples was very small (sometimes only 1 or 2 samples taken), but the evidence is clear...
I’ve read that article and others several times—how do you think I am able to speak of virus transmissibility in bodily fluids?
The only column that matters as far as transmissibility in Table 1 of that article is labeled “Virus culture positive, no. (% sample type tested).” The RT-PCR test can only tell you that viral RNA was present in the sample, but cannot tell anything about the condition of the virus. In a similar manner, you can use RT-PCR to test for and find cow RNA in a steak, but that doesn’t mean you have a living cow on your dinner plate.
Culturing the virus is the only way to know if a sample is infectious. I notice that many of the fluids listed in that table that contained viral RNA did not, in fact, contain active virus. The single saliva sample that had live virus in it probably contained blood. From the number of saliva samples that contained RNA but not culturable virus, it would seem that saliva inactivates the virus (which is not surprising; we have many antiviral and antibiotic molecules in our mucous secretions). The only two fluids I saw that concern me are the breast milk and semen. They contained live virus during the acute phase of the illness, and continued to harbor live virus for a period of time after symptoms subsided. Not in this study, but in another, live virus was cultured from a semen sample collected 82 days after symptoms appeared. *That* is very concerning.