Ebola Can Become Airborne - UN
Speaking to Telegraph on Thursday, he revealed that the killer disease could mutate and become airborne; a development he feared would make the epidemic much harder to curb.
Branbury explained that the longer the virus moves around in its human hosts in the virulent melting pot that is West Africa, the more chances increase that it could mutate.
“It is a nightmare scenario that it could become airborne, and unlikely, but it can’t be ruled out,” Branbury said.
Meanwhile, the UN Ebola chief gave this mouth opening revelation before America recorded its first case of Ebola in Dallas, Texas.
However, William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious diseases expert in a response to the earlier tension that Ebola could go airborne, told Scientific American that there were already several problems associating with Ebola and urged people not to make things worse.
“We have so many problems with Ebola, let’s not make another one that, of course, is theoretically possible but is pretty way down on the list of likely issues. Everything that is happening now can easily be comprehensively explained by person-to-person spread via body contact. We don’t have to invoke anything else,” Schaffner said.
According to the World Health Organisatio, WHO, the recent Ebola outbreak is the largest in history. A new figure released by the Centers for Disease Control showed that the disease had infected about 7,000 people and had so far claimed the lives of about 3,300 people.
The virus is contracted through body fluids; a development that made isolation of patients very imperative and the most reliable way of curb its spread.
It was reported that infectious disease experts had earlier expressed fears of the deadly virus going airborne before but researchers after carefully examining the possibility concluded that though it is physically possible, but such a mutation is highly unlikely to happen.
Meanwhile, Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, has revealed the true heroes of the fight against the deadly Ebola Virus Disease EVD, in Nigeria.
It would be recalled that on October 2, 2014, it was reported that following the current panic in America over the reported outbreak of the deadly Ebola Virus Disease EVD, in Dallas, Texas, the United States government has sent medical experts to Nigeria to study how the country was able to quickly halt the spread of EVD.
