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Comment by celoyd | Hacker News Reader

More power to them. But notice they have defense funding. As the article hints, right now, if someone with Ebola got on a plane to Cairo or Johannesburg, billions of people would die. That’s not worth much in the $10 × 1,000,000,000 people way of the common cold, but it will get you enormous government grants and a huge amount of prestige.

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Unlikely.

I just checked the wikipedia article, and the Ebola virus is not naturally transmitted as an aerosol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola#Transmission). It is transmitted through bodily fluids, including supertiny droblets but that won't effect more than the ten people closest to the infected person on that plane, and before they have a chance to infect anybody else the worlds medical system will have indentified and dealt with the case.

In addition, the virus kills within 2-21 days, so it is unlikely to have time to spread to that many people from each source.

Therefore, this won't be the new black death, but that won't stop the media from comming all over the story.

There has actually been a case of an Ebola-carrier travelling by plane to Johannesburg, back during the Gabon outbreak in 1996. The only other person he infected was a nurse who had come into direct contact with some of his blood. She died a short while later, but infected nobody else.

Ebola is a frighteningly deadly virus, so this sort of research is very encouraging, but its lack of an aerosol delivery mechanism and its quick mortality cycle both mean that it will likely never cause an epidemic on the scale of Bubonic Plague.

Wikipedia makes a city-disaster seem unlikely. It is not much airborne, and isolation-nursing prevents spread.

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