I don't think anyone would say that infection never occurs via inhaled Ebolavirus particles. The point is, as Vincent Racaniello put it to me long ago, it can get in, but it doesn't get out. It's not like pneumonic plague, that flies from lung to lung. Maybe more like anthrax?
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Replying to @WendyOrent @UniversalMaski2 and
Dr. Tara C. Smith Retweeted Dr. Tara C. Smith
He wrote about it too.https://twitter.com/aetiology/status/513142158489300992?t=-NKKWt4H2t65Zu8vvzQKYg&s=19 …
Dr. Tara C. Smith added,
1 reply 1 retweet 12 likes -
Replying to @aetiology @WendyOrent and
That's right. Ebola's primary target cells are the macrophages and dendritic cells. They are in the lungs but are not part of the lung epithelium. When infected, they migrate to the lymph nodes where they really start to wreak havoc. They aren't in the airway, so when...
3 replies 2 retweets 21 likes -
Replying to @angie_rasmussen @aetiology and
...they start to produce progeny virus, it goes into the lymphatic system and then the bloodstream and not the airway. So you can get Ebola by the respiratory route but it's not transmitted that way unless you are right next to someone who is vomiting or having profuse diarrhea.
1 reply 2 retweets 19 likes -
Replying to @angie_rasmussen @aetiology and
And despite what movies say, Ebola does not cause people to cough blood. Mostly hemorrhagic symptoms manifest as gingival bleeding, GI bleeds, intracranial bleeds, and petechial hemorrhaging. That causes a rash but not Kevin Spacey-in-Outbreak-covered-with-bloody-boils rash.
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Replying to @angie_rasmussen @aetiology and
I remember that movie for only one thing, Dustin Hoffman yelling "It's mutated! It's gone airborne!" and I couldn't help bursting into laughter...
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Replying to @WendyOrent @aetiology and
Honestly I think about that scene all the time. Viruses are either transmitted by the respiratory route or not, across various distances depending on many variables. I can't think of a single virus that has "mutated" to "go airborne".
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Replying to @angie_rasmussen @WendyOrent and
(Not sure why I'm tagged on this
but on that minor point): Fouchier et al. (2006) do describe their work as "our experiments showed that A/H5N1 virus can acquire a capacity for airborne transmission" and "without reassortment in any intermediate host." Wouldn't that qualify?2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @zeynep @angie_rasmussen and
(I guess another way to describe it would be to be really bad at human-to-human transmission and becoming better at it, and being agnostic about the prior path—then no conclusion. Anyway, that was on that minor question, not commenting on anything else!).
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Replying to @zeynep @angie_rasmussen and
You were a co-author of this excellent paper describing how respiratory pathogens spread.https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd9149 …
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Ah, okay. Long thread, hadn't even made it up to the top. :-D Right, that's a paper about respiratory pathogens. There are questions about Ebola and lung involvement, but not only is it far from settled, the epi is really close contact/bodily fluid. See:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6784166/ …
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