Oh, my.
That “pissinontheroses” blog is, shall I say, extremely sensationalist, and very lacking in any actual experimentally observed/measured data.
Beginning with using a reference about influenza, which is drastically different from Ebola in very many ways, the blog just goes downhill from there. None of the publications by my USAMRIID colleagues state that the aerosol stability of Ebola is comparable to that of influenza. The closest they come to saying anything of the sort is contained in the phrase “However, aerosol transmission is thought to be possible and may occur in conditions of lower temperature and humidity which may not have been factors in outbreaks in warmer climates [13]” in the paper by Zumbrun et al. Reference 13, in turn, is a 1995 paper by Johnson et al. describing infecting monkeys with artificially generated aerosols. That only means that monkeys can be infected with aerosols, not that any animal or human naturally generates aerosols (the epi evidence says they don’t). The next sentence in Zumbrun et al.’s paper is “At the very least, the potential exists for aerosol
transmission, given that virus is detected in bodily secretions, the pulmonary alveolar interstitial cells, and within lung spaces [14].” In that one, reference 14 refers to a 1996 paper by Jahrling et al. describing the experimental infection of cynomolgus monkeys with Ebola Reston. Ebola Reston is NOT the same as Ebola Zaire—it is not known to cause symptomatic infection in humans, and its pathology differs among different primate species.
I don’t really want to spend more time on that sensationalist blog, but I must address this: “The next time some expert pushes the Ebola mutation risk ask them to specify exactly what mutations would be required to do as they claim. When they refuse, ask why experts spelled out the mutation steps of Avian Influenza and why they won’t for Ebola. The answer is: Ebola can already infect pretty much every cell in the human respiratory system.” A quick reason why the experts “refuse” to specify which mutations would be required to make Ebola airborne is that the experiments have not been done (and probably won’t be). We have no information with which to identify those mutations, and no evidence that Ebola can mutate to a naturally aerosolizable form while remaining otherwise viable. In any case, there is no evolutionary advantage to the virus to change its mode of transmission, it transmits just fine the way it is. And there is no evidence that Ebola (of any type, not just Zaire) shows tropism for any human respiratory cell type. Dang, I’m too tired to try to translate all that into everyday language...
I should point out that virologists pretty much all agree that no virus, ever, has been known to change its mode of transmission. If Ebola were to manage to do that, it would be a historic event.
Watching Congressional Seminar on Ebola Outbreak and Tom Friedan is speaking and said that CDC has a field team right now in Cote d’Ivoire looking at potential cases there.
That would be.. not good.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?321685-1/congressional-seminar-ebola-outbreak-west-africa
Interesting information. Thanks for helping to make things clear for many of us who know very little about such things.