Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Ebola Is Airborne

http://www.inquisitr.com/1541821/ebola-is-airborne-university-of-minnesota-cidrap-researchers-claim/

Ebola is airborne, according to a new report by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota. Researchers at the university just advised the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that �scientific and epidemiologic evidence� now exists that proves Ebola has the potential to be transmitted via exhaled breath and �infectious aerosol particles.�

University of Minnesota CIDRAP scientists are now warning both health care providers and the general public that surgical facemasks will not prevent the transmission of Ebola. According to the airborne Ebola report, medical workers must immediately be given full-hooded protective gear and powered air-purifying respirators. CIDRAP has reportedly been a worldwide leader in addressing public health and safety concerns and preparedness since 2001.

An excerpt from the CIDRAP report reads, �Healthcare workers play a very important role in the successful containment of outbreaks of infectious diseases like Ebola. The correct type and level of personal protective equipment (PPE) ensures that healthcare workers remain healthy throughout an outbreak�and with the current rapidly expanding Ebola outbreak in West Africa, it�s imperative to favor more conservative measures.�

The University of Minnesota report goes on to note that any action which can be taken to �reduce risk� of Ebola exposure should not wait until a �scientific certainty� develops. �The minimum level of protection in high-risk settings should be a respirator with an assigned protection factor greater than 10. A powered air-purifying respirator (PAPR) with a hood or helmet offers many advantages over an N95 filtering facepiece or similar respirator, being more protective, comfortable, and cost-effective in the long run,� the CIDRAP report also adds.

The working theory about Ebola transmission currently being uttered by the CDC and the agency�s director Thomas Frieden, is incorrect and �outmoded� according to the University of Minnesota CIDRAP report. �Virus-laden bodily fluids may be aerosolized and inhaled while a person is in proximity to an infectious person and that a wide range of particle sizes can be inhaled and deposited throughout the respiratory tract,� University researchers concluded. Background information detailing why CIDRAP believes the CDC and WHO are function under an outdated mode of thought when it comes to how infectious diseases are transmitted via aerosols is also included in the new report.

�Medical and infection control professionals have relied for years on a paradigm for aerosol transmission of infectious diseases based on very outmoded research and an overly simplistic interpretation of the data. In the 1940s and 50s, William F. Wells and other �aerobiologists� employed now significantly out-of-date sampling methods (eg, settling plates) and very blunt analytic approaches (eg, cell culturing) to understand the movement of bacterial aerosols in healthcare and other settings. Their work, though groundbreaking at the time, provides a very incomplete picture,� the report said.

According to CIDRAP researchers, early aerobiologists were unable to measure small particles near an infected person and therefore made an assumption that such particles existed on far from the source and airborne transmission could of happened around 3-feet or so from the source.

Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/1541821/eb...p-researchers-claim/#8lwJRud29R0rHEY0.99

Good morning.

Good grief Charlie Brown.

Not good

There is a reason I always have facial hair when fit-testing time rolls around each year. No good seal with any of the cheap masks means I am ALWAYS wearing a PAPR hood when dealing with isolation patients.

Fearmongering.

No scientific credibility.

There's a difference in expelled fluids that certain PPE won't protect against, and "airborne".

I hope you're right. This was on my homepage (Yahoo!) awhile ago. Not that Yahoo is that great of a news source, but there it is.

This is correct, but the fact is they referred to "simple surgical masks" not, say, and N95.

Droplet precautions are "airborne" in a literal sense, but are not the same as airborne precautions.

Having worked with some of the people involved with that study, I would disagree with your assertion that it is without scientific credibility. Can you specifically point out where the scientific method was breached in the study?

From what I read, there is a disagreement in what should be considered "airborne" with the CDC coming down on the side of the more liberal definition and developing protocol the researchers feel is itself not conservative enough due to that. The CDC itself has never recommended "simple surgical masks" but rather N100 respirators. They don't go as far as the researchers do in their exact recommendations but N95 and N100 aren't exactly the same thing.

Perhaps the failure the meet the criteria of "airborne"?

Airborne means if you breathe it you're fugged. Spitting to the other side of a room doesn't make it airborne.

That's what I was always taught anyway. But I think the media and the schit paper companies are using this disease to increase profits, so flexing the definition of airborne probably helps with that.



Travis

As recently as the 'nineties,Vets were claiming that Parvovirus could not be transmitted thru the air. A lot of us dogmen saw too much evidence to the contrary to believe them.

I don't know what their position is now since I don't rase dogs anymore.

Everyone west of Texas better stop breathing.

If they keep us frightened, we will tune in and buy more papers. It's really troubling to think what they do to us, especially since Hitler did the same thing to keep his people under control.

Anytime you cough tiny particles from your lungs are spread into the air. This why you cover your mouth and wash your hands when you cough. If you are close enough to the person coughing then you could breath in these particles.

My wife is an ER nurse in the Houston area and was just told yesterday that the N95 is ineffective at preventing Ebola. She has to go in today so that she can get tested for higher level PPE.

Hmmm. I've read through this post and the cited article twice now, and I'm not seeing any real "news" here.

The finding that Ebola can be transmitted by aerosolized droplets is not new. This was clearly demonstrated in lab monkeys during the Kikwit, Zaire outbreak in 1992.

The assertion that surgical masks are ineffective and that ONLY powered PAPR apparatus is adequate for healthcare workers is a loooong stretch. It doesn't even begin to address the spectrum of "healthcare workers" who must have some form of protection, and it seems to deliberately ignore the concept of putting surgical masks on infected persons rather than healthcare workers. Again, this concept was tested in Zaire and was to a large degree effective.

The level of protection required depends in large measure on the level of risk. Healthcare workers in a triage setting (say, folks in the parking lot outside the ER) do not face the same risk as workers who are hands-on caring for patients with florid Ebola hemorrhagic symptoms. Even in the Kikwit outbreak they knew to have "spacesuits" for the people giving direct care for the actively sick Ebola patients.

I hate to accuse a research organization of sensationalism, but the U of M's press release seems to be exactly that. Maybe Yahoo's newswriters made it sound worse than the UM people intended... but you've got to expect that in today's world of "journalism".

Never let a [bleep] leave Africa, we shouldn't have done it then, and we shouldn't do it now.

remember the rabies example I provided earlier?

Same thing

Snake

Winner winner, chicken dinner.

Doc, around here, people were saying that you have to touch someone to get Ebola. The UofM was responding to that assertion, and pointing out that it is apparently easily spread in close-quarters as a droplet from a cough.

As usual, you are seeing a small fraction of the story and background sensationalized by the media.

Thanks for your take on it Doc. It's surprising to me that so many thought that any mask was good enough when the supposedly fast-and-loose CDC has themselves recommended N100 level protection, unless I'm mistaken.

goalie... agreed, the media is not helping the situation here.

I'm currently re-reading Laurie Garrett's account of the 1992 Zaire Ebola outbreak. Interestingly, she points out that the haphazard reporting of the epidemic and public health efforts to combat it actually fanned the flames of panic and greatly exacerbated the situation.

That was in Zaire, where western "journalists" had to really work to get into the epicenter, so there were few of them. And CNN was the new kid on the block, and internet news outlets didn't even exist.

The mess we're looking at now is orders of magnitude worse, potentially. Panic is almost guaranteed. The degree to which it cripples the nation is the only thing we can't predict at this point.