Dr McCloskey said that because it is not respiratory and airborne, the risk of Ebola being passed on within the confines of a plane were not "on the same scale as pandemic flu".In the case of Mr Sawyer, someone would have had to get his vomit or saliva on a sore, cut or in their eyes - or come into contact with his bodily fluids after using the same toilet - in order for the disease to be passed on.
- From Here
Has Dr McCloskey ever been in a toilet on a plane? I wonder.
“Actually spreads more like the AIDS virus - it’s not airborne:”
Probably no longer true as this recent incident shows:
The spread of this outbreak from Guinea to Liberia in March shows how tracing even the most routine aspects of peoples’ lives, relationships and reactions will be vital to containing Ebola’s spread.
The original case in that instance is believed by epidemiologists and virus experts to have been a woman who went to a market in Guinea before returning, unwell, to her home village in neighbouring northern Liberia.
The woman’s sister cared for her, and in doing so contracted the Ebola virus herself before her sibling died of the haemorrhagic fever it causes.
Feeling unwell and fearing a similar fate, the sister wanted to see her husband - an internal migrant worker then employed on the other side of Liberia at the Firestone rubber plantation.
She took a communal taxi via Liberia’s capital Monrovia, exposing five other people to the virus who later contracted and died of the Ebola
Viruses mutate, Heartlander. Thus new flu shots are developed each year. So Ebola may or may not stay the same.
Meanwhile, at least one company is working on a vaccine for Ebola: Tekmira, a Canadian company, is hassling with the FDA at this time:
http://www.azonano.com/news.aspx?newsID=30671