There's no evidence that Ebola can't evolve into a sharknado, destroying flying 747s with a whirlwind of teeth. Should we also be concerned with this possible evolution?
Ebola has been researched extensively for 40 years. We know pretty much exactly how it spreads. It's not airborne. We also know why certain viruses are airborne and that Ebola is not such a virus nor could its structure evolve so that it becomes one.
If you read the article again (you probably should), maybe this last point will become clear to you.
The article informs us that there is no evidence that it is airborne which is a slightly different statement.
> There's no evidence that Ebola can't evolve into a sharknado
I hope you aren't invoking these nonsensical examples to try to attack the firm principle that nonexistence of evidence isn't evidence of nonexistence.
How this examples is different is that is no reason to suspect that ebola can evolve into a sharknado. This is because in addition to there being no evidence, there is also no plausible hypothesis on how that could happen which could be grounds for a rational suspicion.
There is a plausible mechanism for how a particles of ebola can become airborne. In fact, it is almost certain that they can become airborne. Any such small particle will turn into a floating dust when the droplet which contains it dries out. The only question is, can they survive in that form (and over what distances), such that they can land on a host and infect.
If this question were settled with iron-clad certainty, would we be hearing it in the indirect language of "no evidence"?
>Any such small particle will turn into a floating dust when the droplet which contains it dries out. The only question is, can they survive in that form (and over what distances), such that they can land on a host and infect.
Not only does the virus have to survive drying out, but it has to be able to make it past the mucous protecting your upper respiratory tract and and infect cells there. Viruses that have evolved this capable are very specialized--most viruses are not transmitted this way.
There has never been a recorded case of a virus evolving a completely new transmission mode. We have never seen a virus that wasn't previously airborne "go airborne", and we have have no evidence that Ebola can be transmitted this way right now. In fact we have plenty evidence that it can't be transmitted this way--if it could be, there would already be millions of cases not thousands.
If Ebola were capable of the same kind of airborne transmission as measles and smallpox, previous outbreaks would already have spread around the globe and killed millions or billions of people.
There are so many things that could wipe out civilization: super volcanoes, comet impacts, nuclear war. Why should we worry about a hypothetical scenario for which there is absolutely no evidence? That doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything we can to contain the outbreak, just that we shouldn't spend our time engaging in existential hand-wringing over unlikely, hypothetical threats.
> There has never been a recorded case of a virus evolving a completely new transmission mode.
Keep in mind that there's a lot that we don't know Ebola and how it behaves in different hosts. For all we know, it may be able to spread via aerosols in its origin host, but doesn't bind well to cells in the human upper respiratory tract.
> We have never seen a virus that wasn't previously airborne "go airborne", and we have have no evidence that Ebola can be transmitted this way right now.
We've seen this for avian Influenza A. Herfst et al. did a mutation/serial passage investigation with avian H5N1 that gained the ability to spread through aerosols among ferrets.
Will Ebola gain this ability? Nobody knows. Is it possible? Possibly. How likely? Unknown. Should we panic over it? Like you said, not at the moment.
Absence of evidence which would be expected (more likely present than not) if a phenomenon existed is, in fact, reasonably viewed as evidence of the absence of the phenomenon.
(Absence of evidence which would indicate the presence of a phenomenon but which would not be expected even if the phenomenon did exist is, OTOH, not evidence of the absence of the phenomenon -- or, more accurately, is only very weak evidence.)
The most important, significant data that this outbreak of Ebola isn't airborne as the term is medically used, and as you're suggesting it might be when you talk about "droplets containing the ebola virus could go long distances, or even dry up leaving a airborne particles" is that we are familiar with pathogens that do transmit like that, and Ebola transmits at a much lower rate.
