A) While it's more contagious than HIV, it's not more prevalent in the population. You have a much higher chance of being infected with HIV on a random one night stand than you do getting Ebola in any location of the world, except perhaps Liberia.

B) There's never going to be a true 'cure' as you think of it for a virus like Ebola. Viruses are very difficult to 'cure'--just look at how much money has been poured into HIV and we've gotten it to a very manageable infection. Viruses aren't like bacteria because they invade host cells. They can only replicate if they are inside a host cell. So therefore to truly 'cure' the infection, you have to kill the host cells...AKA you have to kill you. That's not very effective, is it? That's why the only two true options for viruses are vaccines (to prevent infection) or antivirals (to keep them from replicating)

C) In order to be infected by the average Ebola patient--not one that's essentially a human jello mold AKA late stage infection--you'd have to basically be directly sneezed/spat/vomited/pooped on OR ensure that their body fluids physically enter your mucous membranes or open wounds. How many times have you been directly sneezed on by a stranger? Probably not very many. How many times do you handle bodily fluids regularly? If you're a healthcare worker or daycare worker, then maybe. But otherwise...generally just if a loved one is ill. So if your loved ones or roommates haven't gotten it, you're probably not going to get it. One just doesn't go around licking the poles on the subway or the escalator rail, nor do we handle the dead like they do in West Africa.

IUHoosier, how long can the virus live on certain surfaces? Take, for example, a wet towel or a wet bar of soap? (Articles note disinfecting apartments).

On dry surfaces, not too long. The virus actually starts to degrade within minutes--so in whole, it's probably only on your average dry surface for a couple of hours. Doesn't mean it's necessarily contagious, however. It's also easily killed by standard disinfection procedures (aka household bleach). Rather wimpy when it comes to dry surfaces, actually. It's not like anthrax, which has a protective bubble around it so it can live for years in the soil.

Not sure about a 'wet' surface as you define it. Virus in bodily fluids (like a blood tube) can live for a couple days at room temp, but a bar of soap =/= blood. I personally wouldn't handle linens without protective gear just because of the type of contact with the patient. They're more likely to come in contact with the 3 big viral load carriers--blood, feces, and vomit.

High levels of Ebola have not been seen in saliva except in the sickest of patients (think near death or dead), and whole virus has never been seen in sweat. There was a study done in 2007 in an active Ugandan Ebola ward that swabbed ~40 different places (bed rails, stethoscopes, etc.) and NONE of them tested positive for the virus.

A little off topic, but another question for IUHoosiergirl88: how about MRSA? If someone is an active carrier, how serious should this be taken? Should this person be permitted to work in a kitchen, or kiss anyone?

And yes, I have someone in mind.

Thanks -- I am thinking of a typically wet bathtowel after a shower. One still rubs it all over one's body. I am also thinking of bar soap used to wash hands after using the toilet.

CNN has posted an interesting article on Gigi the robot.

Yes....in the early stages of infection there is not a lot of virus present in saliva or mucous. It also doesn't cause sneezing or coughing. So the likelihood that someone with very early disease would sneeze in your eye, or similar, is pretty darn low. The average person who is not a close family member or health care worker, would not be coming in contact with other fluids. Also....once people are at the point of having significant vomiting or diarrhea, they are probably not out and about. And certainly not at the stage where they'd be experiencing any bleeding issues related to the virus.

Feces/blood/vomit are all pretty equal, saliva is much much lower except when a patient is in advanced stages of the disease

You can not trust it all you want. However, the virology community actually knows a lot about Ebola, more than other hemorrhagic fevers that we don't see as often. The American public just doesn't have a high enough level of scientific literacy to understand if the data were presented to them. Fear is an easier response than educating one's self

Fruit bats are a reservoir for many nasty little diseases--Ebola being one of them. Bush creatures (monkeys, animals, whatever) come in contact with or eat infected bats, humans eat bushmeat and get infected. Rinse and repeat, that's caused every outbreak since the discovery of the Ebolavirus family (yes, there's different ones) in the summer of 1976. It probably was around before then, but that's the first time it was officially discovered and named.

In this outbreak, patient zero is assessed to be a 2 year old child in Guinea who died at the end of December 2013. (http://who.int/csr/disease/ebola/ebo...t-big.png?ua=1)

That's a logical thought, but they'll probably backfire and make the disease harder to control. If someone tells you you can't do something--what's the one thing you want to do? You want to do that thing. Plus, there aren't any direct flights from Liberia -> USA, so you'd have to stop ALL flights. And that is going to go over like a lead balloon.

The solution to this is twofold--make sure hospitals here are prepped (Texas Presbyterian wasn't, but tried to act like they were) and get folks on the ground in Liberia to get it contained. The UN acknowledged they blew this one, but it can be contained and burn out, just like it always has in the past. The bigger difference in this case is that it made its way into the big cities, whereas usually it hangs out in rural, isolated areas.

Nah. Although apes and monkeys are more closely related to humans, they have provided few diseases. Herded livestock and rodent pests are more frequent sources of human infections. The greater the population density of the animals a disease infects, the more opportunity that disease has to grow more virulent, to evolve new variants, and to spread.

And poultry.

As for flights, the two that have to date been most problematic are domestic, not international.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5998486

Most of these viruses and bacteria have been around long before humans have been here and will be around long after humans leave. If you want some reading material to illustrate this: "Level 4 Virus Hunters of the CDC" is a great book.

It came over here from Africa via Brussels, Belgium. If you ban travel from West African nations, those nations just aren't going to stamp passports--many nations do this now to obfuscate where their residents are actually coming from. If this happens, it looks like your patient zero came from Belgium, NOT West Africa. You've now made it harder to solve your problem of identifying people at risk. Now, everyone who came off an international flight displaying flu-like symptoms is an 'at risk' Ebola patient. You just took the risk pool from small to extremely large...and that's bad.


You keep throwing around a vaccine/cure like it's some easy thing to pull out of a hat. It's not--we have one possibly effective treatment (ZMAPP)--but that may prove in the long term to be no better than standard health practices. Ebola isn't a lucrative or high profile disease for pharmaceutical researchers, so developing a vaccine isn't high on their priority list. Ebola IS interesting for them because it is similar to a number of other related filoviruses, so if you knock out one you might be able to apply it to those other filoviruses...but maybe not.



The Ebola outbreak is a great opportunity for people to educate themselves on public health, science, and how things work in the pharmaceutical industry.