Here's the lede on a new news account concerning an item published online by the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy on September 17, 2014.
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.”Source: http://www.inquisitr.com/...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.
Here is the core of the analysis:
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 Background information detailing why CIDRAP believes the CDC and WHO are function under an outdated mode of thought when it comes to how infectious diseases are transmitted via aerosols is also included in the new report.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 In the 1940s and 50s, William F. Wells and other ‘aerobiologists’ employed now significantly out-of-date sampling methods (eg, settling plates) and very blunt analytic approaches (eg, cell culturing) to understand the movement of bacterial aerosols in healthcare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.That account is misleading. The report is published by the University of Minnesota CIDRAP. See http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/... .
But it's actually a scholarly comment submitted to the U. Minn. CIDRAP, which the CIDRAP published online:
Editor's Note: Today's commentary was submitted to CIDRAP by the authors, who are national experts on respiratory protection and infectious disease transmission. In May they published a similar commentary on MERS-CoV. Dr Brosseau is a Professor and Dr Jones an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health, Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.Another clarification: the first link above states that the U. Minn. CIDRAP submitted the report to CDC and WHO. That may be, but I can find no evidence of that. The report itself, from Drs. Brosseau and Jones, does address the CDC and the WHO, and probably they sent it themselves to those agencies.
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