Everything You Need to Know About Ebola Outbreak (Prevention)

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In a story about the outbreak of Ebola in western Africa, Prevention magazine turns for comment to Tim Lahey, an infectious disease specialist and associate professor of both medicine and microbiology and immunology at the Geisel School of Medicine. “Even sitting next to a person with Ebola is thought not to be enough to transmit the disease, you need contact with body fluids. If that person sneezes on you, or bleeds on you, or a lot of sweat gets on you, then there is risk of transmission because body fluids have transferred from one person to the other, but Ebola is not airborne. So it requires those visibly obvious things to happen for transmission to occur,” Lahey tells the magazine.

Read more: A Dartmouth Physician Discusses the Ebola Outbreak Information About the Ebola Virus and Dartmouth-Related Travel

“That’s also why Ebola doesn’t typically spread like wildfire through communities,” he adds, “because how many people do you have that kind of contact with?” Read the full story, published in the August issue of Prevention.

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