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It isn’t going to take off by people being sneezed on.

If it took off, it would be for the same reason it spread in Africa — inattention to standard precautions.

The Flu — that is infectious. See how many people get the flu each year? How if one person in a household gets it, there is a reasonable chance that most or all of the household will get it?

Hepititis A is a very infectious disease, which lives for a long time outside of a host, and can therefore be spread through contaminated food products.

Malaria — that’s infectious because mosquitoes can carry it from person to person.

Measles — we vaccinate against this, for good reason. If one person in a room has measles, and you sit in that room for an hour, you are more likely than not to end up with it. If Ebola was “infectious” like measles, Africa would be dead.

TB — if untreated, it kills 50% of the time. And about 1/3rd the world has it. It is airborne. It is nasty. Luckily, we have a vaccine.

But note: If you take the diseases that are TRULY infectious, realize that even with widespread vaccination, more people catch these diseases every year than have ever caught Ebola.

Ebola kills half the people who get it. THAT is what makes it scary. Ebola is highly NON-CONTAGIOUS. It is HARD to catch.

That doesn’t make it safe. Risk has many components, in this case the low risk of infection is countered by the high risk of death if infected.

Still, if I didn’t have a full set of vaccinations, I’d much rather sit in a room with an Ebola patient than with a Malaria patient, or a TB patient, or a Measles patient.

In fact, it could be argued that the reason we don’t have a vaccine for Ebola is that it simply wasn’t worth the money relative to other diseases. If you only have so much money to spend, why spend it on an illness that has a worldwide death rate counted in thousands?