Originally Posted by
AnkleWork
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada:
"When dried in tissue culture media onto glass and stored at 4 °C, Zaire ebolavirus survived for over 50 days"
That's in a tissue culture, and stored at low temp. Bike mechanic don't do autopsies and are unlikely to be dealing with bits of dries tissue. You chose to point out the worst case possibility. The rest of the cited paragraph indicates much shorter viability times under ambient conditions.
If anyone is concerned, they can wipe down the bike with bleach solution or wear gloves but the real world likelihood for picking up an infection from a sweaty (if infected in the first place) is nearly zero.
Unfortunately, the real danger of Ebola in the USA isn't about human health, it's economic. It's very expensive to manage
suspected ebola cases. Currently, we have guidelines for suspicion which include possible sources of infection, and symptoms such as fever. If we let the genie out of the bottle the number of possible (not probable, just possible) sources explodes exponentially. That alone might still be manageable, except that we're entering flu season. Imagine if a large percentage of flu cases had to be managed as possible Ebola. Our medical resources would be swamped in short order as we have to search for needles not only in a haystack but throughout farm country.
Fortunately this isn't my problem and I don't have to make policy, but I do support some sort of limited quarantine (more like limited travel into crowded areas and reduced/managed contacts, than strict quarantine) to try to keep this particular Genie in the bottle.