Where is the Ebola Tipping Point?, page-6

Hi Trae

The virus does not travel on the wind but if a symptomatic person with it sneezes  and the spray  somehow gets to another person's  eyes, mouth or skin cut I guess transmission can occur.  That said sneezing  may  not spread Zaire Ebola  particularly well.

If you can forgive SOS International for getting virus particles mixed up with "germs" (for the common reader I guess) this is what they say:

"Outbreaks in humans
Ebola virus is contained in the blood and body fluids of infected people (vomit, diarrhoea, urine, nasal secretions, sweat, ejaculate). These fluids are contagious. If someone has contact with an infected person's body fluids, they can get Ebola. The more symptomatic a person is, the greater the risk of catching the virus from their body fluids. In addition, it is possible to become infected by touching contaminated objects (objects that have germs from an infected person on them). The germs get onto the toucher's hands, and then may accidentally be transferred into the nose, mouth or eyes, or enter the blood stream via cuts on the hands.
Clearly, family, carers, and medical staff are at high risk. Funeral practices that require touching, washing or kissing the dead body promote spread of the virus.
Once a human has been infected, an outbreak can occur if proper precautions are not taken. "

If we build an intuitive mathematical model around village based patient care and funeral practices for the usual  Zaire strain of the virus you can work backwards from the statistics to get  least a feel for the transmissibility  of the virus the frequency of such transmission around high risk events, practices including daily living.  What we see I guess is sporadically bad less than the definition of a pandemic.  

If we shift the virus statistical assumptions from a small village to a  large third world slum that lacks running water, sanitation and  medical facilities the outcomes are intuitively much much worse ... particularly where some sufferers are not sufficiently ill to be bed ridden and where political interference & mismanagement is leads to open revolt.  Are proper precautions being taken?  I would say only where treatment centres are still operating HOWEVER there are vast tracts of countryside where Ebola is present and there are no treatment centres.  We don't hear about the bulk of cases from such areas.

cheers