Or phasing that another way: It depends how willing you are to ignore the facts and invent unsupported "worst case scenario" scenarios.
There is no factual reason why we should expect the transmission mechanism to suddenly evolve before our eyes. That's raw fear mongering. While Ebola is more deadly than Bird Flu, that kind of wild unsupported speculation is why so many people thought Bird Flu was far more dangerous than it actually was.
"The more time you give a virus to mutate and the more human-to-human transmission you see," she says, "the more opportunities you give it to fall upon some [mutation] that could make it more easily transmissible or more pathogenic."
- Pardis Sabeti, computational biologist at Harvard University
"make it more easily transmissible _or_more_pathogenic_"
You probably should be more concerned about the flu or the common cold becoming lethal than about Ebola becoming airborne. Reason? There are way more throws of the mutation dice for the common cold and flu than for Ebola because these are way more common.
Something like the Spanish Flu returning scares the living shit out of me (while I also know it's remote), that fucker does mutate, it is airborne and it has happened and that was in a world with slow transport.
That said I'm still more likely to die from Heart Disease or Cancer, statistics ftw.
Well, there is this: "While all Ebola virus species have displayed the ability to be spread through airborne particles (aerosols) under research conditions, this type of spread has not been documented among humans in a real-world setting,
such as a hospital or household."
I could've sworn that Ebola-Reston was airborne-transmissible in real-world settings (albeit amongst non-human primates and swine), but I can't find a cite for that; I could just be misremembering things from Richard Preston's The Hot Zone.
Theorized but not conclusively shown, as the "Discussion" section in that study indicates. Transmission may have occurred due to large droplets or fomites contacting the mucosal membranes of the monkeys.
