Correct me if I am wrong, but in the news, US doctors from West Africa who are helping curb the spread of Ebola there have contracted the disease themselves. They are being brought here to continue treatment. If they are brought here in the US, is there a possibility for an Ebola outbreak in the US?
Technically it isn't airborne, but every time someone coughs they send out small droplets of bodily fluid in a fairly sizeable area, and ebola is supposed to be able to survive on surfaces for a couple hours. So if an ebola patient coughs, and those droplets get on someone else or someone else touches where they have landed and then rubs their eyes or something, they suddenly have ebola. So though it's not airborne, it has the potential to spread to people who have no contact with the infected person, in the waiting room of an ER for example.
I'm not sure, I've asked myself the same question. The WHO states that airborne transmission has not been documented yet. In my understanding, airborne transmission and droplet transmission are synonyms. Of course that theoretically contradicts the "bodily fluids" transmission, but it could simply be due to a very low concentraion of viruses in the lungs.
Do you know of a documented case where droplet infection of an Ebola virus happened?
Not of any documented cases, no. But we had only a few cases in the U.S., and most of these initial infections were not closely observed as they took place in Africa. Of the cases in the African population, it would be very hard to trace the source of an infection, particularly when symptoms take so long to appear. But here's a short page about the theory of it nonetheless, in regards to inhaled droplets.
'Experiment' would be a better word, but I'm nitpicking. Seems there are also a few more recent studies on that page, my only problem is that I didn't see an indication for the virus concentration in droplets of an infected human anywhere (at least not in the abstracts). So although the virus seems to have the potential to infect via airborne transmission, we actually don't know if humans are infectious through that way. Though I guess in a case when you're next to a patient, you're better safe than sorry
anyway, soon you all can be relieved cause as of 6 jan. 2015 the dutch company Curcell has successfully made a vaccine for ebola. only have to wait till sept. 2015 for the test results about using it safely on humans.. after that it can be spread globally in just a few weeks/months...
