Re:CDC confirms first Ebola case diagnosed in US
by timr on Tuesday September 30, 2014 @07:02PM
(#8391918)
I'm basing that number on a paper I read a while ago that estimated the infection channels from a variety of experimental and epidemiological data. I can't find the original article with a quick search, but there are plenty of other papers that show how efficient the hand-contact mechanism is. For example:
In that study, 11 of 15 hand-contact exposures to a rhinovirus led to infection, which is not 80%, but it's within the margin of error. Notably, it was almost as good as large-particle aerosol exposure at spreading the virus.
But yes, the important point is that you don't need an airborne virus for a pandemic. Every virus is different, but there's this public fixation on "airborne" transmission that is a bit of a red herring. Ebola is doing just fine without it.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/205151
In that study, 11 of 15 hand-contact exposures to a rhinovirus led to infection, which is not 80%, but it's within the margin of error. Notably, it was almost as good as large-particle aerosol exposure at spreading the virus.
But yes, the important point is that you don't need an airborne virus for a pandemic. Every virus is different, but there's this public fixation on "airborne" transmission that is a bit of a red herring. Ebola is doing just fine without it.