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Dr. Bausch was directly asked about fomite infections:

"How long can the virus exist outside a human host?

The viruses can only replicate in living tissue, they commandeer certain proteins and functions of a living cell for their replication. So once any organism dies, there can be no more replication of a virus. Bacterium is different, right? If you leave the food out bacteria will grow. But a virus can't do that. And so in this virus, Ebola virus, it's not kind of an Andromeda strain-type thing where we can't kill the virus; we can kill the virus pretty easily through bleach and Lysol and alcohol, and a host of different things. And so once it gets out in the environment, it's not particularly hardy.

You can't give an exact number of hours or days because there's not been a lot of research; we need more research, and it also depends upon the conditions.

Viruses don't like heat and light, and that will inactivate what they call a lipid membrane of this virus. And so if that virus is out in an area where there's a lot of heat and light, then it's going to be inactivated relatively soon. If that virus is in a place where it's dark and cool, it'll last longer.

If you put it in a test tube and you put the test tube on the table in a cool, dark place, it'll probably last for, I don't know, weeks, maybe. But if a drop of blood on this table that dries and is out in the light and heat, we're probably talking hours to days of this virus surviving."

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Dr. Bausch was also directly asked about fomite infections on public transportation. His answer was Yes, But (maybe because we don't know) Rare —

>>Is there potential for transmission in public transit; if someone with Ebola were to shed blood or sweat and another passenger came in contact with the blood or sweat?

So is there the potential? What often happens is people come with scenarios that are, say, like this. So you're in a taxi and they say, well, what if the person who was in the taxi before me was a sick person who was bleeding or had vomiting, and then [the taxi driver] dropped them off at the hospital. And the passenger had contaminated the seats with vomitus or stool. And then I get into the taxi and I put my hand on the seat, and then I touch my eye. Could I get Ebola like that? Yes, you could get Ebola like that.

Is that really what our major concern is? Those things are probably very [rare].

>>How much do we in fact know about transmission?

We don't really have lots of sound data of what period people start shedding virus and from what tissues. And so that would be incredibly valuable data. What we do have is the epidemiological data, and when we put that together from past outbreaks, it really appears that most infections occur from very sick people late in the course of their illness.

One thing that happens, and it's very clear from both human as well as non-human primate data, that in Ebola, the sicker you are, the higher your viremia — the level of virus in your blood. Conversely, if you're not very sick, you have a very low level of virus in your blood, you're not particularly infectious.

And when you think about it, the virus, it's not jumping off the wall, it has to get from one person to another. And so if I have Ebola right now – which I don't, by the way, I haven't been in West Africa for over a month. But if I had Ebola right now, even if I said, “OK, I have a fever and a headache, but I still feel well enough to have this conversation,” your risk of getting Ebola from being around me and probably even shaking my hand, is extremely low to nil, because I just don't have very much virus.

It's clearly not transmitted from casual contacts. Going and shaking hands with a person who's not sick does not transmit Ebola. And then someone will ask: Well, what if they had a sick family member at home and they didn't wash their hands? So you can always come up with something where you say, “Yeah, that could do that.” And the example I use is, OK, there's a plane that's flying overhead, and could that plane crash now into this building and kill us? It could, but it's probably not the most likely thing we need to worry about.

So we know how this is spread. This is spread from direct contact with sick people, and that's where we need to focus. And is there somebody somewhere who had indirect contact through one of those things, from being in the wrong taxi or kind of the wrong situation? It probably happens and we don't know it, but it doesn't happen very often, and it's not where we need to focus our public health approach..

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This sure looks like a case of "Yes, But...I don't want to consider vehicular Ebola fomite infection" to me..

As in, "We don't want the public to think about it for fear of what the public's fear will do to out international public health logistics."

This is very much a case of needing "public trust" to function and the international public health authorities treating the 'irrational public' as something to be despised and lied to in order to maintain control...

...which is the surest way to lose public trust in the "smart phone Internet" era. It isn't irrational to fear something that will kill you and your loved ones horribly.