I don't know either, but I think they're just not telling us shit, so as to not cause a panic. Here's some photos of medical personnel in Dallas. Maybe I'm wrong, but to me it appears the CDC believes this thing could be airborne as well:
Or it's just not airborne.
Maybe they're wearing the suits because having as close as possible to no chance of contraction is the only way you are going to get any sane person living in the West to come within one hundred yards of a highly fatal pathogen? Or it's just par-for-course standard when dealing with any highly fatal pathogen?
There have been ~7,400 reported cases with around ~3,200 deaths reported by the WHO. Just stop reading here if you think the WHO, an NGO without a history of deceitful behavior, has some twisted motivation to lie about these figures.
There have been outbreaks in Monrovia (Capitol of Liberia - Population 970,000+), Freetown (Capitol of Sierra Leone - Population 1,200,000+) and Conakry (Capitol of Guinea - Population 1,660,000-2,000,000+).
Just speaking in terms of the capitol cities and completely ignoring the outlying population centers of these nations you have an infection rate of .00192%.
Now, let's put the conditions under which these folks are living under into perspective with a picture of Freetown, Sierra Leone:
Here's Monrovia:
and Conarky:
We are talking about infectious events occurring in areas with population densities of 2,668/sq mi (Monrovia), 8,695/sq mi (Freetown) and 9,600/sq mi (Conakry).
This puts Freetown and Conakry in the same ballpark for population density as an average medium-to-large US City (NYC being an obvious exception).
To reiterate, this current outbreak has an infection rate of around .00192% in regards to the general population - that's with me being very generous with the population figures and only counting the major population centers of each nation.
These are folks living in fairly densely populated areas, and generally in relative squalor. When was the last time you shit through a hole in your floor, and then ate off of that same floor the next day?
The Spanish Flu of 1918 (an airborne pathogen) infected nearly 4% of the WORLD population in under 2 years. This was in a time before air travel and with far, far less movement across state borders than we see today - even considering the war.
It did not have any problem infecting large swaths of developed European and North American cities. It even touched remote islands in the South Pacific without issue.
Obviously this outbreak hasn't been raging for two years. But in today's world with the amount of border-crossing and relatively higher populations across the board in almost all regions of the world, you would have expect to see far, far more carnage by this point if the infection was truly airborne. There are also a litany of other reasons why Ebola is a poor candidate for an epidemic (world militaries focused on weaponizing things like Smallpox for a reason).
I also don't believe the figures from the WHO are wholly accurate, but that's a result of these outbreaks occurring where they are - not a conspiracy. If it was an airborne infection there would literally be blood flowing in the streets of Western Africa (at least, significantly more than usual).
There's a long, long list of reasons that refute the idea this outbreak is airborne and almost none that would support it.
I don't think the point I'm about to address was part of your post but I may as well address it while I'm writing this bit.
To all of you who think that somehow the fact that 'Western' doctors (as if being from the West somehow infers some magical ebola-repellant shield upon your being) becoming infected while caring for patients in Western Africa is a sign that this is airborne...have you ever bothered reading into the kind of conditions and facilities these folks deal with while they are there?
Scroll up to those pictures again if you need some perspective.
Just because they are from the West, educated and working for a health organization doesn't mean they have the supplies, support or fucking anything else they would need to guarantee they could avoid infection while dealing with dozens or more patients each day.
Dealing with patients who don't even (and sometimes actively reject) basic hygienic and scientific principles such as germ theory. Patients whose family may rush the clinic and stab you to death for giving their relative ebola, in their eyes.
The doctors and caretakers who were infected and passed while working in Western Africa were not victims of some airborne pathogen that the CDC (and every other government agency who is working in Western Africa right now - from a variety of nations, as well as multiple NGOs) are keeping under wraps. They are martyrs who died trying to preserve the humanity of people that plenty on here wouldn't even consider human to begin with. They're braver than me, braver than you - and they died fighting for the life of someone else.
I mentioned this earlier in the thread but there's also a very large difference between droplet spray and airborne infection:
FAQ: Methods of Disease Transmission