Posted on 10/03/2014 4:31:15 AM PDT by markomalley
Ebola is not fragile outside the body. It is extremely rugged and can survive for days outside a host. It can dry out and be revitalized with moisture.
From what I’ve read the reason it isn’t considered airborne is because the virus is heavy and won’t stay suspended in the air for long.
What does airborne mean anyway? We know the virus particles are in all bodily fluids. Fluids which are expelled from the body can become airborne with a sneeze, cough, or splashing of vomit or diarrhea.
Thats why the CDC stores it in the highest security and strongest protections avaailble.
Clearly she is a liar.
Or Reston.
A link to this thread has been posted on the Ebola Surveillance Thread
We should use some common sense and stop all flights out of the three west African nations that have huge Ebola problems. That would be a good start.
Rabbits could fly. Same logic. It is called evolution. Sure it could happen, and I could be hit by the beer truck tomorrow. But when assigning risk, one must look at the NOW known facts, not SPECULATION.
The game of Ebola Roulette continues...
*click* spin *click* spin *click* spin…BANG!
Eeeee-bolllll-aaaaaa ping!
Bring Out Your Dead
We’re gonna need 
a bigger cart!
Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.
The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.
So far the false positive rate is 100%.
At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.
*sigh* Such is life, and death...
Thanks for the ping!
CDC lists kissing as a method of transmission.
The virus also seems to survive longest in semen.
There have been issues with ‘recovered’ surviving patients transmitting through copulation.
Suggesting a virus does not, nay, WILL not mutate should raise flags for EVERYONE; as well as show them to be, at the least, hacks to be ignored/derided and humiliated.
No virus has ever been known to change its mode of transmission. While we cannot say it is impossible, if Ebola were to manage to change from blood-borne pathogen to respiratory virus, it would be a historical first.
In order to become airborne, it would have to change the type of cell it infects. It would have to change the way it infects (because different cells express different proteins, it would have to interact with different proteins than it currently interacts with). It would have to become a physically more robust virus, able to survive prolonged periods of desiccation.
In other words, so much would have to change at once for it to become airborne, that the chance is just about nil. We might as well expect pigs to sprout wings.
There has never been definitive evidence that Ebola Reston is airborne. The monkey facility in Reston was dirty, and there are plenty of other ways the virus could have reached the monkeys in the other room. For instance, it could have been carried on shoes from room to room, or on wet lab coats.
Also, Reston is not a mutation of Zaire, but is a descendant of a common ancestor virus that existed around 100,000 years ago (IIRC). Reston and Zaire, as well as the other three known strains of Ebola, evolved in parallel.
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