Call me slightly skeptical, but just because experts have said it won't doesn't mean that it hasn't or won't. I wouldn't consider it a fixation, it is rather a healthy skepticism. I would prefer to err on the side of caution.
All of the experts from the CDC who have given us information over the airways have all said that Ebola can't do this or that only to backtrack at some point, meanwhile two nurses get infected while taking care of a man who dies of it. None of them know how they got infected. If I were the nursing director, my nurses would act as if it could be airborne.
The only thing the experts have done is encourage Obama to trot out a worthless czar, because who really wants to be held responsible for it all?
If I might essay a suggestion, it's because you, and they, are speaking in medical terms and the media are speaking in the vernacular.
As I understand it, "airborne" refers to the virus being ejected in large doses in the mucosa of the lungs. If the virus is not present in the lung mucosa, the thing isn't airborne. That much is fairly straightforward.
Naturally, other body fluids such as saliva, vomit, and even, under some circumstances, blood, are also ejectable through sneezing, coughing, etc, but in considerably smaller amounts. If those amounts are infective then we have a virus that is not "airborne" but is potentially contagious through ejected body fluids anyway, but not terribly contagious and under fairly rare circumstances.
I could be entirely wrong about this but that's my understanding. Best to you.
The nurses were not using PPE correctly, a situation that was fixed only when the CDC showed up.
If you were nursing director, and instructing your nurses to use airborne, rather than droplet, precautions, your nurses would NOT be protected against Ebola. The precautions actually have to be tailored to the mode of transmission. The droplet/contact precautions for Ebola are far more stringent than airborne precautions.