Because most health officials have so far assured the public that Ebola can only be spread through physical contact with an infected person, U.S. citizens have maintained a fairly collected attitude, even after the first infected person brought the disease to the states from Liberia.
But according to some Ebola experts, such assurances could be misleading and dogmatic, and we shouldn't be too quick to rule out the possibility that the disease can spread through the air in close quarters, the LA Times reported.
"We just don't have the data to exclude it," Dr. C.J. Peters, who fought the 1989 Ebola outbreak among research monkeys in Virginia and also led the CDC's most in-depth study on Ebola's transmissibility in humans, told the LA Times.
Another researcher who has worked closely with the virus, Dr. Phillip K. Russell, a virologist who oversaw Ebola while working at the U.S. Army's Medical Research and Development Command, also confirmed that much of this Ebola incarnation is still a mystery, and said that considering currently known information as hard facts would be a mistake.
"Being dogmatic is, I think, ill-advised, because there are too many unknowns here," Russell said. "Scientifically, we're in the middle of the first experiment of multiple, serial passages of Ebola virus in man...God knows what this virus is going to look like. I don't."
Russell said Ebola could conceivably mutate on its path from human to human and end up spreading in ways never before seen.
CDC spokesman Tom Skinner provided reassurance that the CDC remains confident that the virus is only transmitted by direct physical contact with an infected person. Skinner said the CDC is continuously analyzing whether the virus is mutating in abnormal ways that would call for a policy change in the government's response methods.
