COMMENTARY: Health workers need optimal respiratory protection for Ebola
Full article at link, but here is the summary:
Lisa M Brosseau, ScD, and Rachael Jones, PhD | Sep 17, 2014
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.
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Adequate protection is essential
To summarize, for the following reasons we believe that Ebola could be an opportunistic aerosol-transmissible disease requiring adequate respiratory protection:
•Patients and procedures generate aerosols, and Ebola virus remains viable in aerosols for up to 90 minutes.
•All sizes of aerosol particles are easily inhaled both near to and far from the patient.
•Crowding, limited air exchange, and close interactions with patients all contribute to the probability that healthcare workers will be exposed to high concentrations of very toxic infectious aerosols.
•Ebola targets immune response cells found in all epithelial tissues, including in the respiratory and gastrointestinal system.
•Experimental data support aerosols as a mode of disease transmission in non-human primates.
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/09/commentary-health-workers-need-optimal-respiratory-protection-ebola