We ’ve been hearing a hatful about how Ebola is both not very contagious and , at the same time , highly infective . Could both be true ? It turn out , yes .
In comparison to other contractable diseases , Ebola is not as transmissible as , for case , the rubeola or the mumps . While a disease like the measles can spread through the tune , making its bedcover through a population comparatively speedy , Ebola transfer requires direct contact to make the leap to a new person ( perhaps just one of the reasons that Ebola travels through a population on ordinary nine times dumb than the morbilli ) .
https://observationdeck.kinja.com/ebola-is-not-that-contagious-1641839156
When you start talking about how infectious a disease is , however , that ’s another story . While how contagious a virus is can be wait at as its spread head through a universe , how infectious a disease is comes down to how much of that computer virus — whether it ’s in the thousands of particles of merely a few — are required to transfer the virus to a new sufferer .
CommenterNative Plantexplains :
I just want to clarify some language that is frequently used interchangeably . Infectiousness and contagiousness are not the same affair .
Ebola is not very contagious , but it is incredibly infective . tangency with only a few viral particles ( 1 - 10 ) is enough to acquire disease . At the time of end ( or at maximal viremic loading ) a free fall of bodily fluid could have 500,000 viral particles in it . The transmissibility of those particles is how “ contagious ” it is .
An analogy would be that you could kill yourself by drinking too much inebriant . You could drink too much beer , or you could wassail too much vodka . You ’d have to drink a much great volume of beer . If beer were much easy to get than vodka this analogy would be jolly good . And if vodka , when you did find it always resulted in you attempting to wassail enough to kill you . But when you came across beer there was n’t enough there to kill you … I was work on a better example with keys and door lock but I could n’t make it accurate enough .
For comparability , Norovirus is 55 particles , Streptococcus is 1000 , the distinctive E. coli that does n’t commonly kill you is in the billions .
Image : Ebola computer virus particle / National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , NIH
EbolaMedicine
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