There’s nothing actually new about this. The thing people keep losing track of is that in disease talk the word “airborne” has a very specific and rather limited meaning. It means the sick person exhales the contagion and you can get sick breathing in the same space. So when they same something isn’t airborne they are NOT saying there’s no way you could inhale it, as anything that small can always wind up in the air and inhaled. Think hantavirus, pretty much everybody who gets it inhales it, they just happen to inhale it from dried mouse pee that turns into dust in the air, not an airborne bug, but you can still inhale it.
I’ve decided if people here want to live their lives scared to death of things that have almost no chance of happening, that is their choice. If they want to think that they are going to catch Ebola wandering through their daily lives, you aren’t going to convince them otherwise.
Meanwhile, somehow Duncan’s entire family and friends seem to have avoided getting sneezed on, with only two nurses involved in his end-care and handling of highly infected bodily fluids getting the disease.
If Ebola ever actually became Airborne, we’d know it by the hundreds of thousands of Africans who suddenly became infected. Then you’d see real panic.
What IS clear is that the CDC is completely unprepared to handle a REAL infectious disease. We need congress to completely zero out the CDC current spending budget, and impose a NEW budget that funds ONLY infectious disease prevention.
Because there ARE diseases that spread easily, and are one mutation away from being deadly or becoming resistant to our antibiotics. And THAT is the real threat, not Ebola that can’t manage to kill 10,000 people in a backwards 3rd-world country where they actually handle their dead bodies for burial without any protection.