(Newswire.net — September 18, 2014) — Last week, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, published an op-ed in The New York Times in which he argued that the ability of Ebola to become airborne is a real risk that virologists do not like to talk about publicly.
“The Ebola virus does mutate, or change its genetic material fairly frequently, but this does not necessarily mean it can become airborne.” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Pittsburgh.
The HIV virus has a high rate of mutation as well, but it has not acquired the ability to spread through the air despite infecting magnitudes more people than the Ebola virus has, Adalja said.
“In fact, none of the 23 viruses that cause serious disease in humans have been known to mutate in a way that changed their mode of infection.” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former deputy commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration, who recently wrote about the topic in Forbes.
However, each new human infection with Ebola gives the virus a chance to mutate, Osterholm said. “If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola,” Osterholm wrote. “Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe.”
Osterholm recalls, a 2012 Canadian study in which pigs infected with the Ebola virus spread the disease to monkeys housed in cages in the same area, but did not have direct contact with the pigs. The monkeys showed signs of respiratory infection with the virus. This study, Osterholm wrote, “proved that Ebola Zaire, the same virus that is causing the West Africa outbreak, could be transmitted by the respiratory route from pigs to monkeys.”
But contrary to Osterholm’s statement, Derek Gatherer, a bioinformatics researcher at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, said the study was “unable to conclusively prove that the transmission was airborne.” The study researchers themselves wrote in their paper that, while the animal facility was being cleaned, droplets containing the Ebola virus could have been splashed into the monkey cages, and the monkeys may have become infected by touching the dried droplets.
Even if the Ebola virus did spread from pig to monkey through the air, “this is a rather contrived model if our primary concern is human-to-human [transmission], in which case the experiment should have been monkey-to-monkey,” Gatherer said.
Still, Dr. Adalja said it is important to keep checking the Ebola virus in this outbreak, and future outbreaks to see what mutations are occurring and whether those mutations affect the spread of the virus.