Please define "host" for the above (9:55 PM) post. Richard, do you mean a person, or an individual cell that has been shed by a person or other mammal, or a cell in a petri dish, since you're saying "demonstrated?"

Please define "survive" for the above post. Do you mean the coating remains recognizable and continues to coat some dna that stays recognizable, or do you mean the virus remains actually capable of infecting a new host, which will now be defined as either an individual cell in a petri dish, since we're talking research, or an individual (human, let's say)?

Because while all the research is very important for future knowledge, right now the crux is Can this strain of the virus actually infect another person.

And so far the epidemiology suggests no, not unless there is contact with a lot of virus in a body of bodily fluid that is still fluid.

Like a pool of blood or a pond of sweat, but probably not even a jizz of semen. There is no evidence at all in the epidemiology of this outbreak to suggest you can get it from a place a droplet of sweat once fell or, in point of fact, from just sex. This is not considered a sexually transmitted disease. If you have sex with someone sick with fever they will sweat, and you'd get it from their sweat.

The people being infected have all cared for the dead or dying and been in direct physical contact with their blood or sweat. The Texas guy had carried a dying pregnant 19-year-old neighbor to a taxi after she was already bleeding out. The nurse had not been trained on how to get back *out* of a *contaminated* hazmat suit safely, so she also is incredibly likely to have had direct contact with blood or sweat.

And we do know that the virus lives in but does not sicken many other mammals, but I don't know if we know that dogs are one of them. There is no evidence at all, nor any indication at all, that there is a danger from Ebola from the outside of other mammals, since the virus doesn't infect the outside of mammals. Unless, I guess, you drench it in blood or sweat, and even then, once that dries, the animal is no longer a danger.

The blood/sweat is the danger, not everywhere it has been.

The reason dead ebola victims are so infectious is that the virus has turned their entire insides (pretty much everything but bone and skin) to one big bodily fluid that, contained within the skin, stays fluid. The phrase Ebola bomb is descriptive and was used in The Hot Zone.

And since everybody checks people for fever by feeling their foreheads, one of the first things humans do is catch the virus from the people they are concerned about, who *are* feverish and likely to be sweating since that is part of the human fever response to infection.