Fact check. This is not AIDS. This is not polio.

Ebola fast facts

Ebola is extremely infectious but not extremely contagious. 

It is infectious, because an infinitesimally small amount can cause illness. 

Laboratory experiments on nonhuman primates suggest that even a single virus may be enough to trigger a fatal infection.

All the same, the virus is a lot less contagious than any of the many that are airborne, like flu viruses, SARS, and cold viruses.

Partly that's because it isn't airborne, but mostly it's because only people with actual symptoms shed the Ebola virus and those people are way to sick to get around, very much unlike people with flu, SARS, or a cold.

On the other hand and again on the down side, this virus survives and remains deadly outside the body for up to 5 days in normal circumstances.

If you catch it, this is how quickly things will go.

Medical data

In non-fatal cases, patients typically improve approximately 6 days after the onset of symptoms. 

. . . . 

Fatal disease has been characterized by more severe clinical signs early during infection and progression to multiorgan failure and septic shock. 

Death typically occurs between days 6 and 16.

I spare you the ghastly details of how awful things will be during the illness.

If you live, the virus persists, alive and deadly, for months in semen and breast milk.

But you have antibodies that last at least a decade, say the medicos.