[jonrimmer]

If it mutates and becomes airborne, it might be. That's why containment is so important, even if it doesn't seem so threatening in its current form. Viruses constantly mutate, and every extra person they infect gives them a million more opportunities to do so. All it takes is one of those mutations to make the virus airborne, and we're in big trouble.

[tjradcliffe]

While it is tautologically true that if Ebola were to become capable of airborne transmission it would be much more dangerous, there is considerable evidence against the proposition that it is "just one mutation away" from such capability.

Ebola has been around for a long time, and by your own reckoning has had billions of opportunities to mutate into an airborne form. It has not done so. Why not?

The Ebola genome consists of about nineteen thousand base pairs, compared to three billion in the human genome. While that represents a vast amount of combinatoric complexity, biochemical capabilities are not magic. They are not conjured into existence by the wave of a mutational wand, but have to have some substrate in existing functionality, which is why species exist: they are are islands of relative genetic viability in a sea of chaos. An incremental move away from the stable centre will in general be detrimental to the organism, and it will, in the overwhelmingly most common case, require many small, fortunate steps to add a genuinely new capability.

The fact that Ebola has not yet become airborne despite its many opportunities to mutate and do so suggests that we are dealing with a typical case here: that the current genetic configuration of the virus is more than "one mutation away" from being airborne, and it may well be a case of "you can't get there from here" (at least not easily enough for anyone to very worried about in a country where cars kill tens of thousands of people a year and people with guns kill thousands).

Nor does it follow that an airborne form of Ebola would be as deadly as the current form. With such limited genetic material to play with, an airborne virus would necessarily have to change some other characteristics, any of which could reduce its ability to kill.

[crimsonalucard]

There was an airborne strain of ebola that made it to American soil. The catch was that this strain only infected monkeys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston_virus

[noir_lord]

> All it takes is one of those mutations to make the virus airborne, and we're in big trouble.

Except that the mutation to go from a fluid to airborne virus isn't one mutation it's lots of mutations and that is simple not what we see happening in general.

The common cold could mutate into a super deadly virus but it doesn't, Flu usually doesn't either but rarely does (you want to see a genuinely terrifying virus at work read the accounts of the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, that thing took down the young and strong in days).

Containment is important to prevent the spread via fluid contact.

This "if X then if Y then if C then if D then Global Collapse" scaremongering helps absolutely no one.

[declan]

>Except that the mutation to go from a fluid to airborne...is not what we see happening in general

I've written a bit about infectious diseases but defer to virologists or other folks who are better informed. I do remember reading these two articles about airborne transmission of Ebola, which might be what the previous poster was thinking about:

http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00811/full/srep00... EBOV infection in swine affects mainly respiratory tract, implicating a potential for airborne transmission of ZEBOV2, 6. Contact exposure is considered to be the most important route of infection with EBOV in primates7, although there are reports suggesting or suspecting aerosol transmission of EBOV from NHP to NHP8, 9, 10, or in humans based on epidemiological observations11

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/opinion/what-were-afraid-t... If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola. Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico. --Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota

[chc]

If AIDS mutates and becomes airborne, that would also be threatening. Ditto for hantavirus, hepatitis and millions of other diseases. Heck, imagine if black widow venom become airborne and victims started producing more airborne venom themselves! If you're willing to dip into the pool of things that are vanishingly unlikely, there are lots of extremely bad things that could happen.

[waterlesscloud]

Hantavirus is sorta airborne. http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/technical/hanta/airborne-trans...

[santosha]

You can make the exact same statement about every other deadly virus, though. Why is ebola any different?

[mark-r]

Because there is evidence that there were airborne strains of it in the past.

[Bud]

Because it's a lot more deadly than the vast majority of viruses.