View Single Post
Old 10-30-14, 12:13 PM
  #22  
FBinNY 
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
Location: New Rochelle, NY
Posts: 38,725

Bikes: too many bikes from 1967 10s (5x2)Frejus to a Sumitomo Ti/Chorus aluminum 10s (10x2), plus one non-susp mtn bike I use as my commuter

Mentioned: 140 Post(s)
Tagged: 1 Thread(s)
Quoted: 5793 Post(s)
Liked 2,585 Times in 1,433 Posts
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.
__________________
FB
Chain-L site

An ounce of diagnosis is worth a pound of cure.

Just because I'm tired of arguing, doesn't mean you're right.

“One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions” - Adm Grace Murray Hopper - USN

WARNING, I'm from New York. Thin skinned people should maintain safe distance.
FBinNY is offline