scientist pricks finger with ebola needle on accident

[HAL 9000 96]

It's not a 100 percent certainty the researcher was actually infected with Ebola.

Just because your jabbed, doesn't mean you there was transmission of the virus, hollywood not withstanding.

Care to speculate on the multiplicity of infection needed for Ebola to actually infect a human host?

Mind its exceptionally high rate of replication.

Depends on the strain of the virus, if there was a sufficient amount of fluid on the tip of the needle, if there was fluid inside the needle, how far the needle went in, if it actually drew blood, or was just on the surface (scratch), lots of variables.

Did she immediately douse the area with alcohol? (standard practice in a level 4 lab)

If it was in the fluid, and was injected, then it's almost assured the person would be infected.

I am glad they are using the vaccine, that bug is pretty nasty, but can be handled with basic hygiene/barrier nursing techniques, manageable.

You have to give props to people working with these things, trying to cure them - they risk death for others.

Alcohol dousing is standard even at level 1 when that sort of thing happens. I just seeded some plates in a level 2 not 10 minutes ago.

But you do have the host factors that influence infection... sort of. Ebola strains, down to Marburg in the same virus family, can count on only needing an MOI in the single digits to successfully infect a host cell. Given that one viral particle is less than 10µM in diameter, and one dermal mesenchyme cell can be quite an order of magnitude larger, with an MOI of 5 it means that you get 5 viral particles to one cell, and if the cell is close enough to a small capilary, then you can propagate an infection.

With a diameter of 10µM, you're talking about residual fluid in a 30.5G needle tip potentially holding more than 1,000 viral particles.

Pretty scary stuff. My hats off to these level 4 researchers. I hate level 2 enough to not want to go higher.

Remember - I was just speculating from the literature I have read on the subject.

Hats off to you for working with that stuff, no matter what the level. I would not want to go by it.

Other than nuclear weapons, germ warfare/nerve gas frightened me the most while I was in the military and now. Can't see the stuff till it's too late. and they didn't have enough MOPP suits to practice with, so they just said "roll down your sleeves and tuck your pants in your socks, and put on the Mk 5 gas mask...." "it's the same thing as a MOPP suit..."

Tiny little drop of nerve gas on you - eyes go to pinpoints, your chest feels like it's getting squeezed, seizures, then death. Not a pretty way to go.

Not at all... I've had the distaste of seeing first-hand what several chemical and biological agents can do to humans... not cool whatsoever.

[jhcruz18 3]

oh no. I hope she is gonna be ok.