As a terror weapon this is what frightens me far worse than any dirty bomb could.
You just know some Jihadist would LOVE to get a vial of spit from some poor shmuck dieing from it and FEDEX it around a while. Eventually ending up in his cousins hands who spends two weeks spreading it around population centers until he suicides while his house burns masking his involvement.
Make 9/11 look like walk in the park for the cost of a few plane tickets and a few suicide seekers.
Remember, onset of symptoms are indistinguishable from the flu. Nobody takes serious precautions with the flu until they’re ill enough to not go to work; unless they KNOW they’ve been exposed, nobody thinks “Ebola! Better quarantine myself!” when getting a case of the sniffles.
My question on Ebola is this. If there is a widespread breakout of this, and lets say it mutates and goes airborne.
In the course of the breakout does Ebola continue to mutate until it becomes a less dangerous virus?
A short side bar.
If you want a reasonably accurate fictional portrayal of what we might be looking at when it comes to the Ebola virus get and read Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders, published in 1996.
It will take some selective reading to avoid getting entangled it the various sub-plots, but the late Tom Clancy did and excellent job describing how such a biological problem could spread from a hospital in Zaire to the US. Granted, in the fictional story Ebola has help from a hostile government, but ...
All in all not too bad a job for a story written a decade ago and first copyrighted in 1996.
From a previous post
Not likely but if the TSA start wearing masks be afraid it won’t be Halloween.
This strain looks like it is AIRBORNE, not like influenza or the common cold, but it survives in large droplets in the air. The definition of airborne is being parsed.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-20341423
From the article:
“One possibility is that the monkeys became infected by inhaling large aerosol droplets produced from the respiratory tracts of the pigs.
One of the scientists involved is Dr Gary Kobinger from the National Microbiology Laboratory at the Public Health Agency of Canada. He told BBC News this was the most likely route of the infection.
“What we suspect is happening is large droplets - they can stay in the air, but not long, they don’t go far,” he explained.
“But they can be absorbed in the airway and this is how the infection starts, and this is what we think, because we saw a lot of evidence in the lungs of the non-human primates that the virus got in that way.”
Basically macaques and pigs in the same room no physical contact but Ebola transmitted.