A new report suggests that the cough of very sick Ebola patients could be as dangerous as their vomit or diarrhea to those around them. However, the same experts also cautioned that this doesn't mean that the deadly virus could spread quickly through the air, as illnesses like measles or flu do.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior associate at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Health Security stated that the report "shouldn't be something that alarms the public into believing that Ebola could become airborne in the way that measles is."
"This paper doesn’t say that," said Adalja, who was not involved in the study.
As stated by the study authors, the saliva of an Ebola patient does contain traces of the virus. Also, the amount of virus in bodily fluids such as blood, saliva, vomit and diarrhea increases as they grow more ill, noted the report from the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.
Ebola attacks nearly all the body's organs, including the lungs. So, if a caregiver breathes in droplets coughed by an Ebola patient, "it is possible that primary pulmonary infections could occur," the Minnesota team wrote.
The study authors noted that based on prior evidence, health workers dealing with Ebola primarily have worried about disease transmission from a patient's blood, vomit and feces, all of which contain high levels of virus as symptoms progress.
However, health care workers also might need to worry about a patient’s cough, the authors speculate in the Feb. 19 issue of "mBio".
"The West Africa Ebola epidemic surprised even the most astute infectious disease experts in the global public health community," the report concluded. "We should not assume that Ebola viruses are not capable of surprising us again at some point in the future."
Still, they stressed that airborne transmission of Ebola — similar to that which occurs with the flu or measles — remains unlikely in the future, given that it would require the virus to undergo a substantial mutation.
Could Ebola be Spread by Cough**?**
"When a patient is very, very sick, they have high virus levels in all of their body secretions," said Dr. Ambreen Khalil, an infectious disease specialist at Staten Island University Hospital in Staten Island, N.Y. "They tend to vomit. They tend to cough up blood. When you are in close proximity with a patient this sick with Ebola, aerosol transmission is conceivable."