Here's the lede on a new news account concerning an item published online by the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy on September 17, 2014.
Ebola is airborne, according to a new report by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota. Researchers at the university just advised the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that “scientific and epidemiologic evidence” now exists that proves Ebola has the potential to be transmitted via exhaled breath and “infectious aerosol particles.”
University of Minnesota CIDRAP scientists are now warning both health care providers and the general public that surgical facemasks will not prevent the transmission of Ebola. According to the airborne Ebola report, medical workers must immediately be given full-hooded protective gear and powered air-purifying respirators. CIDRAP has reportedly been a worldwide leader in addressing public health and safety concerns and preparedness since 2001.
Source:
http://www.inquisitr.com/...
Here is the core of the analysis:
The working theory about Ebola transmission currently being uttered by the CDC and the agency’s director Thomas Frieden, is incorrect and “outmoded” according to the University of Minnesota CIDRAP report. “Virus-laden bodily fluids may be aerosolized and inhaled while a person is in proximity to an infectious person and that a wide range of particle sizes can be inhaled and deposited throughout the respiratory tract,” University researchers concluded. Background information detailing why CIDRAP believes the CDC and WHO are function under an outdated mode of thought when it comes to how infectious diseases are transmitted via aerosols is also included in the new report.
“Medical and infection control professionals have relied for years on a paradigm for aerosol transmission of infectious diseases based on very outmoded research and an overly simplistic interpretation of the data. In the 1940s and 50s, William F. Wells and other ‘aerobiologists’ employed now significantly out-of-date sampling methods (eg, settling plates) and very blunt analytic approaches (eg, cell culturing) to understand the movement of bacterial aerosols in healthcare and other settings. Their work, though groundbreaking at the time, provides a very incomplete picture,” the report said.
That account is misleading. The report is published by the University of Minnesota CIDRAP. See
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/... .
But it's actually a scholarly comment submitted to the U. Minn. CIDRAP, which the CIDRAP published online:
Editor's Note: Today's commentary was submitted to CIDRAP by the authors, who are national experts on respiratory protection and infectious disease transmission. In May they published a similar commentary on MERS-CoV. Dr Brosseau is a Professor and Dr Jones an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health, Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Another clarification: the first link above states that the U. Minn. CIDRAP submitted the report to CDC and WHO. That may be, but I can find no evidence of that. The report itself, from Drs. Brosseau and Jones, does address the CDC and the WHO, and probably they sent it themselves to those agencies.
Follow me below the orange virus particle.
That is not a peer-reviewed scientific journal article, although it may be submitted. But it is an informed scholarly comment with numerous scientific sources cited in footnotes. I'm not endorsing those scientific claims, just passing them along. They are made by what seem to be reputable experts and they are published by a reputable university. Even if only partially correct, they should be part of the discussion.
My first link is to a site I'd never seen before, inquistr.com, which I found on Yahoo.com. It appears to be a reputable news aggregator site. I scanned all of its sections, and it does not have a right-wing slant. Indeed, if anything, it seems to have a bit of a left-wing slant.
Caveat: some RWNJ sites like Infowar and Breitpart are right now pounding this story with insane heat and distortion. Here I've tried to be level-headed by linking to the actual report and the identification of the authors.
I'm not panicked. I'm not trying to cause panic. As everybody knows, in the United States the risk of death from the flu or 1,000 other things is much higher than from Ebola.
That being said, Ebola is a major threat to the whole world.
My takeaway from articles like the one highlighted here is twofold: (1) it's ridiculous to take current CDC and WHO guidelines at face value as holy writ, as some have been doing here, and (2) the level 2 protective gear recommended for hospital workers by CDC is inadequate. At a minimum there should be a hood that covers the entire head, and respirators instead of surgical masks.
A note about terminology: This report, of course, is not claiming that Ebola is currently "airborne" in the sense that some other pathogens, like flu, are airborne. It is not saying that Ebola can sail on the wind for miles. But they're claiming that its risk of transmission on small aerosol particles through the air is higher than currently claimed. At a minimum, that means that anybody in the room with a very sick Ebola patient is at higher risk than is now generally believed.
Note that they're also claiming to have good evidence that Ebola can be contracted through respiration of aerosol particles, something that is currently generally considered to be impossible.
As background, here's a link to the University of Minnesota CIDRAP: http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/....
Important Update: The scholarly paper includes this:
We recommend using "aerosol transmissible" rather than the outmoded terms "droplet" or "airborne" to describe pathogens that can transmit disease via infectious particles suspended in air.
So I've changed the diary title to be more precise. The paper uses the term "airborne" several times.
Update 2: As I learned in the comments here, the CDC has just upgraded its recommendations for hospital protective gear. Here is a good NYT report on that:
http://www.nytimes.com/...