Excuse me, but why did you post stuff copied from the CDC website? Why do you think I haven’t already read it, as well as dozens of the actual research articles there are on the subject?
That excerpt from the CDC says exactly what we have known all along—that Ebola can be spread through fomites and droplets, and that it is not aerosol. I’ve already said that in at least two posts in this thread alone.
If you have new knowledge—for instance, new research articles from scientific journals—that you think scientist and other interested FReepers may not have seen yet, by all means, post it. We’ve probably already seen what the CDC has to say, though.
Even if this is true, it is not a reason to be complacent.
There is no practical difference between aerosol transmission and droplet transmission if you are in a confined space with someone else who is sneezing or coughing. Just how sick is that airline passenger two rows behind you anyway?
Contact with contaminated surfaces is insidious and almost impossible to avoid. If a virus can survive for a few hours while encapsulated in a fomite or droplet, it can find a new host.
What saves people is that most viruses degrade rapidly when they are dried and exposed to sunlight and air. Also, virus have a fairly high failure rate to bind to host cells, so it take lot of them (several thousand virons) to get an infection started.
The new Ebola strains appear to have more effective binding mechanisms (they are more infectious), and survive longer in fomites or droplets. Patients may be shedding contagious levels of virus earlier in the course of their disease too.
The rules are changing.