Ebola mutation to air-transmittal of infection: how likely?

[Broomstick]

@dracoi

You’re right that you as an individual can’t do much, but there are things we can do as a global society that could help.

Yes, that is true. To the extent I can influence global society I will do so. As it happens, my influence of that sort is somewhere between “nearly nil” and “absolutely zero”.

For example, if we avoid mixing types of livestock together, we can reduce the chance that a pig and a chicken get together for their diseases to hybridize. If we take steps to reduce the contact between domesticated animals and wild animals, same thing.

True. However, I’m not a farmer. I do keep my domestic animals separate from wild animals for their own good, as well as the larger good of society.

Should I start keeping livestock in any quantity I’ll keep that caution in mind.

In Africa, there’s no doubt that improvements to health care, sanitation, communication and transportation would all yield enormous benefits. Disease control would be just one of them. If we reduced the amount of bush meat taken, we’d not only protect endangered species, but also reduce exposure to disease.

While I would love to have sufficient influence and wealth to make such an impact the bitter truth is that I am barely able to take care of my own at this point. Hence, there is nothing I can do personally about the matter however much I’d like to.

None of these are easy fixes and they’ll never reduce the risk to 0%, but they might take our risk from 1% to 0.5%, and that seems like a worthwhile effort.

Agreed.

Meanwhile, fretting about things I have no control over is a waste of my own energy. I do what I can in my corner of the universe and that’s all I can do.

[snowthx]

I understood ebola to be a disease not evolved for humans - meaning that we are a dead-end host. We can get infected, but we die too quickly, and we are not part of it’s natural lifecycle. A disease that has such a high mortality rate is not going to do well in that host, long-term. Infections between humans are just lucky for the bug. It’s natural reservoir is some types of fruit-eating bats, which it does not kill as swiftly as us.

So, I suspect ebola would take a long time to mutate to become airborn, unless it is evolving such a capability in it’s natural hosts. I would think from a species survival point of view, it would evolve first to be no so deadly to it’s newfound host.

[Captain_Amazing]

@Iggy

Ebola Reston was airborne. 100% certain. It spread from monkeys in one room to monkeys at the other end of the building. Six human animal handlers were later proved to have seroconverted - produced antibodies to the virus.

Dumb question, but if six animal handlers (who would have access to the monkeys throughout the labs) seroconverted from being exposed to the virus, then isn’t it possible that they were the vector of infection beween the seperate monkey labs?

[Ramira]

See the discussions I linked to. The assertion that it is 100% certain is 100% incorrect.

[usedtobe]

@Ravenman

Just in case someone reads this literally, that many weapons labs all over are working on such a weapon: the Biological Weapons Convention prohibited such research more than four decades ago. It’s likely a good bet that some rogue states continue such research, but it seems doubtful that a significant number of countries are spending money on a weapon that would be so extremely difficult to control.

The treaty did not stop the US and USSR from cultivating smallpox - which thus far is extinct in the wild.
Yea vaccination.

[Ravenman]

The Soviets did indeed have an offensive BW program for many years, but the US program ended in 1969. Research on BW defenses continued of course, because it would be rather silly to stop that research because of its utility. DoD research into Ebola resulted in the drugs that are currently being examined for treatment and vaccination, for example. That doesn’t mean the US is creating Ebola weapons.

[Leo_Bloom]

It would be a first:

Professor David Heymann CBE, chairman of Public Health England and professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said no virus transmitted by bodily fluids - as Ebola is - had ever mutated to airborne transmission.
“There has never been a virus transmitted in this manner that converts to a respiratory virus, and there is no evidence that this has ever occurred in the epidemiology,” he said at a discussion programme on the virus in London on Wednesday night. He mentioned HIV and Hepatitis B as example of viruses transmitted by bodily fluids that had “never converted to a respiratory virus”.

[JackieLikesVariety]

that’s good news.