Experts Worry Outbreak Could Trigger Ebola ‘Evolution’ into Airborne Virus

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read the title of this article, then read this quote from the same article.

“There are over 7,000 Ebola cases worldwide and 3,300 deaths. The World Health Organization said it is spreading faster now than at the beginning of the outbreak in February.

However, other experts said it is a possibility, but very unlikely Ebola will ever be an airborne disease. None can finger a disease that went from non-airborne to airborne in humans.

“We have so many problems with Ebola, let’s not make another one that, of course, is theoretically possible but is pretty way down on the list of likely issues,” said William Schaffner, an infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University. “Everything that is happening now can easily be comprehensively explained by person-to-person spread via body contact. We don’t have to invoke anything else.”

He continued: “The difficulty is that those [flu] viruses don’t have the protein attachments that can actually attach to cells in the upper airway. They have to develop attachments to do that. Since the virus doesn’t have attachment factors that can work in the upper airway, it’s very rare for it to go human to human, and then it almost always stops and doesn’t get to a third person.”

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