![]() Emily Landon, during an interview with Al-Jazeera How much Ebola does it take to make you sick? "Most of us have a pretty good idea of whose bodily fluids we've come in contact with." - Dr. Little things like washing hands and cleaning the things you stepped in off your shoes would interrupt transmission. Please notice that there were a lot of "ifs" in that scenario. It's very unlikely to happen that way, but it is possible. We all do that habitually without thinking about it. Or maybe you do, but you move the shoes later and don't wash your hands. You walk home, take you shoes off and set them in a dark moist place. A little vomit gets stuck in the treads of your shoes. But how long does that take, for it to dry out or for sunlight to kill it? If somebody with Ebola throws up on the street, how long will it stay moist enough to cause disease? It's a welcome change to hear good news about Ebola. With Ebola that takes about two weeks and symptoms are present for a day or two before it's highly contagious. You can be exposed to influenza and pass it on to your family within two of three days-before you develop symptoms. We can also be reassured because a person with Ebola can't spread the disease until they feel pretty sick. Each patient with Ebola only infects 1.5 to 2. For example, a person with measles infects 18 additional people on average (in an unvaccinated population). This number tells us how many people, on average, a sick patient will infect. In epidemiology we use a statistic called the R naught to help us understand how contagious a disease is. It's a horrible disease, with a mortality rate in the 50 percent or more range, but social and political factors make spread more difficult to control in western Africa than in places like the US or even Nigeria. If you spray it with rubbing alcohol or a regular disinfectant like Lysol, it will die. It's one of the easiest to kill of all pathogens. Dry is not good for Ebola and sunlight is not good for Ebola. Most of the disease spread that has occurred in West Africa seems to be related to much more direct methods, contact with blood or vomit, urine or feces.Įbola can't stay alive outside the body for a long time if it gets dried out or exposed to sunlight. That can spread the disease theoretically but studies have not identified that as an important risk factor. It is not generally spread through the air like measles or chickenpox, but people standing nearby when someone coughs, sneezes, or vomits could get droplets into their mouth, nose, or eyes. However, you can touch infected body fluids and then touch your mouth or nose or eyes. That means you have to get it not just on your intact skin, which can be a pretty effective barrier, but it has to get onto one of your mucous membranes (nose, eyes, mouth, etc.), or a cut. How does the virus move from one person into another?įor this virus, it requires direct contact. That's not a source that we typically focus on if we find ourselves doing contact tracing for a disease like this, but it could become important to keep in mind. When it comes to Ebola, contagious bodily fluids include blood, vomit, urine, stool and, to a lesser extent, tears and saliva-all of those, plus semen, where the virus can still be present three months after the patient gets better. What does the phrase bodily fluids really mean? Last week, we spoke with hospital epidemiologist Emily Landon, MD, about the ways this disease is transmitted and how that plays into deliberations about how to handle any possible case that present to a U.S. They sprayed the body, and the little girl on the floor, with chlorine as they left." A small child stood on a cot watching as the team took the body away, stepping around a little boy lying immobile next to black buckets of vomit. A corpse lay in the corner - a young woman, legs akimbo, who had died overnight. In the next ward, a 4-year-old girl lay on the floor in urine, motionless, bleeding from her mouth, her eyes open. "Nurses, some not wearing gloves and others in street clothes, clustered by the door as pools of the patients' bodily fluids spread to the threshold. A New York Times article graphically described a scene, now distressingly common, in a West African clinic: Soon after the first diagnosis of Ebola Virus Disease in the United States, bodily fluids became a socially acceptable and near-ubiquitous topic of conversation.
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