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E is for Ebola (Dallas TX)

Wakeforest22890 said:
Oh damn I thought you were in Connecticut for some reason. We need to meet up for a game with some people. WRS, Ayo (somewhere), and RSF all live up here plus I'm sure some others.
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Grew up in CT, but I've been in Boston for 15 years now. I'd be down for a viewing party sometime, though right now I'm pretty slammed at work.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Oh damn I thought you were in Connecticut for some reason. We need to meet up for a game with some people. WRS, Ayo (somewhere), and RSF all live up here plus I'm sure some others.
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Great idea. Take the guy with the airborne version of Ebola to a public sporting event.
 
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The correct answer is 1993, Katy. When did you become a journalist at CBS News?
 
It's weird for people who don't believe in evolution to claim that Ebola is all of a sudden going to go airborne.
 
PhDeac said:
It's weird for people who don't believe in evolution to claim that Ebola is all of a sudden going to go airborne.
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Oh...that's a really good point.
 
Well this thread sure has died.

On the bright side, you guys will be happy to know that Gov. Perry has designated the hospital I go to as the North Texas first response center for Ebola. If the HIV didn't get me, maybe the Ebola still will.
 
It died because the media is moving on to the next flavor of the week. I guess over reporting and mass hysteria did not change the evolutionary constraints of Ebola making it turn airborne.
 
The Hot Zone and the mythos of Ebola

Here’s why The Hot Zone is infuriating to so many of us in epidemiology and infectious diseases.

[...]

Second, airborne Ebola. Though this trope is often traced back to “Outbreak,” Preston clearly suggests that both Zaire Ebolavirus and Reston Ebolavirus can be airborne. What he never discusses nor clarifies is that the “evidence” for this potential airborne spread is really thin, and not even indicative of animal-to-animal or animal-to-person transmission.

Rather, it’s much more likely that if airborne spread was involved, it was aerosols generated by husbandry (such as spraying while cleaning cages), rather than ones which would have been generated by infected primate lungs (a necessary step for primate-to-primate transmission via a respiratory route). Indeed, this is the paper that Nancy Jaax et al. published on the findings Preston talks to Jaax about, 13 years after the fact (the experiment is marked as 1986 in The Hot Zone), and noting that transmission due to husbandry practices could not be completely ruled out. It’s unclear also that the Reston strain moved through the primate facility via air, rather than via spread due to caretakers, equipment, or husbandry, even though it’s frequently cited as fact and without any qualification that Reston is an airborne type of Ebola.

Instead, here is what Preston says about it:

“If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person. But Ebola had drifted across a room. It had moved quickly, decisively, and by an unknown route. Most likely the control monkeys inhaled it into their lungs. ‘It got there somehow,’ Nancy Jaax would say to me as she told me the story some years later. ‘Monkeys spit and throw stuff. An when the caretakers wash the cages down with water hoses, that can create an aerosol of droplets. It probably traveled through the air in aerosolized secretions. That was when I knew that Ebola can travel through the air.'”


​
He then comes back to “airborne Ebola” several times, based in part on this idea.

But here’s the thing. Just about any virus or bacterium could be aerosolized this way–via high pressure washing of cages, for example. If it can bind to lung cells and replicate there, as we already know Ebola can, it can cause an active infection.

But that’s not the same as saying “Ebola can drift across the room” from one sick person to a healthy person and cause an active infection, as Preston tries to parallel with HIV in the above paragraph. Even in Jaax’s experiment and others like it, there’s zero evidence that primates areexpelling Ebola from their lungs in a high enough concentration to actively infect someone else. And that is the key to effective airborne transmission. Think of anthrax–if it’s released into the air, we can inhale it into our lungs. It can replicate and cause a deadly pneumonia. But anthrax isn’t spread person-to-person because we don’t exhale the bacteria–we’re dead ends when we breathe it in. This is what happens with primates as well who are experimentally infected with Ebola in a respiratory route, but Preston implies the opposite.
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ThinkingWithMyDeac said:
It died because the media is moving on to the next flavor of the week. I guess over reporting and mass hysteria did not change the evolutionary constraints of Ebola making it turn airborne.
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Well, that and a lack of new cases.
 
Looks like Obama's Ebola Czar fixed this shit quick. Props.
 
Liquid Karma said:
My wife was yelling at the TV tonight when the Hot Zone author was on talking about how the disease could mutate and become airborne. Richard Preston is neither a medical doctor, nor a scientist.
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I think I'd change the channel of my wife started that shit.
 
The "Hot Zone" was written before Al Gore invented the interwebs, so I'm not inclined to take the author as an expert on infectious disease.
 
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