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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

The point of comfort for the U.S. is that ebola transmission currently requires direct contact with bodily fluids--not that it's easy to diagnose.

If you had a fever and went to work, and it turned out you had ebola, it's still unlikely you would infect your coworkers, because it is rare for American workers to directly contact each others' bodily fluids.

Think of ebola like AIDS that kills faster. That's the right mental model for how it is transmitted. And, it's a good reminder that we have decades of practice managing diseases transmitted that way.

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Here's the thing: most people get the flu by contact via "bodily fluids". You cough, sneeze, drool, wipe your nose, and so on, then touch something. Someone later touches the same thing (or you), then touches their face, and the transmission has occurred. There have been papers on this.

It's easy to get fixated on aerosol transmission because it's fancy, but "bodily fluids" are a damned effective vector for the everyday transmission of a virus.

(Also, HIV is a pretty poor model for this. As viruses go, HIV is pretty hard to transfer -- even heterosexual sex has a low rate of seroconversion.)

The flu virus is very good at getting you to spread your bodily fluids all over the place: it makes you cough violently. The droplets are also invisible, so it's easy for others to touch them without knowing.

Ebola has many symptoms, but coughing isn't one of them. By the time you start coughing up blood, most people in the developed world will know better than to touch that blood.

You don't need blood. It's transmitted in sweat, saliva, tears...everything.

The point I was trying to make is that Ebola patients don't spray their bodily fluids the way flu patients spray saliva.

> Ebola is not like the flu. You're not going to catch the disease from simply being across the room from someone who has it.

> Basically every health agency in the world agrees on this point. In order to catch Ebola, you have to come in contact with bodily fluids — such as sweat, saliva, vomit, or diarrhea — of someone who already has Ebola and is exhibiting symptoms. (A person who is infected but not yet showing symptoms generally isn't infectious.)

> And yet, remarkably, many readers have been unconvinced by this point.

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/10/5980553/ebola-outbreak-virus-ae...

This was the first of many available sources in a quick Google search.

I don't understand why there seems to be so much interest in hyping the threat of ebola to the U.S. Maybe it has to do with the many doomsday virus stories in our culture?

An analogy: a friend of mine worked at a "Wild West" type museum. He got a call from someone who wanted to know if there were any black cowboys. My friend told the caller that yes, there had been many black cowboys. The caller said "that can't be true. How come I never saw any in western movies??"

"The point of comfort for the U.S. is that ebola transmission currently requires direct contact with bodily fluids"

Doctors who knew they were working with Ebola still managed to get infected. So it can't be that hard to get it.

We don't need to panic, but it would be unwise to be too complacent.

They may have known they were dealing with Ebola, but they didn't have the equipment or facilities to take all the steps necessary to prevent transmission.

Keep in mind these doctors were surrounded by hundreds of cases and potential cases, in field hospitals without even running water. It's quite understandable that they would be at risk even while taking what precautions they could.

> Doctors who knew they were working with Ebola still managed to get infected.

Yes, but these doctors often don't even have the equipment to provide proper antiseptic medical care let alone containment-type biosuits.

In addition, quarantines can be rolled out quickly and effectively in modern countries with well-developed communication infrastructure.

This is not to say that we should be complacent. However, a bad flu epidemic poses more direct hazard to the modern world.

I'm not arguing for complacency, but comparing the transmissibility of ebola to the flu is just simply inaccurate.

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