Has Ebola gone airborne? Fears spread that virus could mutate

Concerns have been raised that the federal government is anticipating a rapid spread of the Ebola virus, as evidenced by the U.S. State Department ordering 160,000 hazmat suits.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Market Watch posted a press release in which Lakeland Industries, a manufacturer of protective clothing, announced that it intends "to join the fight against the spread of Ebola" by helping to fulfill the State Department's huge demand for hazmat suits.

This outbreak could cause a scale of death unseen in modern history. Please take action now to save your brothers and sisters in Africa.

"With the U.S. State Department alone putting out a bid for 160,000 suits, we encourage all protective apparel companies to increase their manufacturing capacity for sealed seam garments so that our industry can do its part in addressing this threat to global health," said the press release.

The State Department has announced that it plans a "surge" of emergency medical personnel into West Africa, but so far only 1,400 federal aid workers are currently in the region.

More news comes as President Barack Obama is planning to send 3,000 U.S. soldiers and Marine into Liberia, one of the West African nations hit hardest by the outbreak, to oversee the transportation of medical staff, supplies and equipment.

Even more frighteningly, German virologist Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit caused a public outcry when he said that the battle against Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia was lost, and that the outbreak may end up killing five million people.

Further evidence that the virus has mutated has led to fears that Ebola could have gone airborne to a limited extent.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, wrote in an op-ed piece that, "there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years."

Osterholm continued to say that the thought of Ebola mutating to become transmissible through the air is a possibility "that virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private."

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