October 6, 2014

Every new natural disaster in the world seems to breed another insane right wing conspiracy. Suddenly, with no evidence to suggest otherwise, conservatives are inciting fear in Americans by saying that the CDC is lying to Americans and Ebola can be transmitted through the air. Vox reports that evey health agency in the world says Ebola is spread throuigh contact.

Ebola is not like the flu. You're not going to catch the disease from simply being across the room from someone who has it.
Basically every health agency in the world agrees on this point. In order to catch Ebola, you have to come in contact with bodily fluids — such as sweat, saliva, vomit, or diarrhea — of someone who already has Ebola and is exhibiting symptoms. (A person who is infected but not yet showing symptoms generally isn't infectious.)

if we were dealing with sane people this information would suffice, but we're not so the Alex Jones type sickos are now claiming that the virus could mutate at anytime. See, even though it isn't, it's theoretically possible so run for your lives.

Fox News asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases if people should be worried that Ebola can or eventually could be spread through the air.

WALLACE: You and other officials keep saying flatly there's no way that Ebola can be spread through the air. It has to be direct contact with bodily fluids.
But Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the University of Minnesota wrote this, and we put it up on the screen, "The second possibility is one that virologists are loath to discuss openly, but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. The current Ebola virus's hyper evolution is unprecedented; there's been more human to human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years."

I mean, what he seems to be saying is Ebola is already doing things we didn't think it could do. How solid is the science that it won't be able to make this jump?

FAUCI: Well, I'm not loath to discuss it publicly and I will discuss it with you. Certainly hypothetically, anything can happen. But if you look at the track record of viruses, viruses mutate and they change. They could become more virulent, less virulent. It is extremely rare if not unprecedented that a mutation will occur to completely make it transmitted by a way it never transmitted before. Is it theoretically possible? Yes. Is it likely? No.

It's very sad that I have to bother writing a post like this, but in the coming days I'm sure Fox News and the conservarazzi will bring on more and more fake scientists to make more phony claims and accusations to scare people.

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