The University of Minnesota denies that its Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) has said Ebola can be transmitted through the air.
CIDRAP News had published a commentary raising that possibility on Sept. 17.
"Being at first skeptical that Ebola virus could be an aerosol-transmissible disease, we are now persuaded by a review of experimental and epidemiologic data that this might be an important feature of disease transmission, particularly in health-care settings," the authors wrote.
Some news sites such as Breitbart.com took that to mean CIDRAP officially endorsed the authors' position.
On Thursday, the university said CIDRAP does not make that claim. The authors, Lisa M. Brosseau and Rachael Jones, are from the University of Illinois at Chicago, not the University of Minnesota, the rebuttal stated.
Ebola experts such as Erica Ollmann Saphire at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla said the virus can't survive as dry microscopic particles wafting in the air or on surfaces, because dessication destroys the viral membrane.
It's also extremely unlikely that the virus could be transmitted through droplets from a nearby person sneezing. Tests in non-human primates have failed to find transmission through droplets, and such transmission has not been documented in people.
However, Ebola replicates with greater efficiency in the respiratory tract of pigs, Ollmann Saphire said. In the laboratory, monkeys housed in cages about 10 inches away from infected pigs have acquired Ebola through droplet transmission.
"So do not bring your infected pig on an airplane," Ollmann Saphire said. "Do not spend multiple days in face-to-face contact with an infected pig."
