michael87cn said:
Is saliva not a bodily fluid? Cuz you blow thousands of microscopic blobs of it with every breath. Let's not even talk about what happens when someone sneezes. It's REALLY disgusting. Okay, let's talk about it. When someone sneezes, they basically are CAKING the entire room they are in with their snot. Yum!
Sooooo, can you not get ebola this way? You have to drink their blood? Cuz you should just say that instead of "bodily fluids" if what you mean is blood to blood contact. It's just confusing.
I mean, if it is other stuff then ebola is actually highly transmissible just like the common cold is.
No, they mean bodily fluids. However, that term doesn't necessarily mean all bodily fluids, all the time (for example, HIV isn't carried in saliva). Ebola can be carried in saliva, but is not airborne, and certainly nowhere near as transmissible as Rhinovirus, this is a simple fact. Also remember, unlike colds, ebola patients are only contagious when they're symptomatic.
As for saliva, not all Ebola patient's saliva actually carries the virus, it's speculated here that the virus is inactivated by salivary enzymes, so most patient's saliva (assuming their data set is representative) isn't contagious.
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/196/Supplement_2/S142.full
barbzilla said:
However, no matter how rare it is, there is a possibility that this strain of Ebola could mutate into an Airborne transmissive disease with a long incubation period (I.E. no symptoms), which would cause it to spread like wildfire across populated areas before the first symptoms were noticed. If you combine that with the nearly 80% fatality rate of the virus, it is potentially a very serious threat (Even if the chances of this happening are one in a million, that is 1 more than I am comfortable with).
Significantly more unlikely than one in a million. As it need to evolve to be airborne, long incubation period, and contagious before symptoms develop.
Also, the virus doesn't have an 80% fatality rate. It depends on the strain, with different outbreaks varying wildly in lethality, with death rates anywhere between 23% and 88%. The current outbreak is relatively low down the list, with a 47% mortality rate.