Money is a good one to start with. And there's always other rationalizations, if that's not good enough for some reason.

Notice how you morphed the discussion from viruses changing modes of transmission to being about showing explicitly that there was a mutation causing the change in mode. I merely showed the former and consider the counterexample satisfied. I don't know nor have a capability to show how often these diseases have mutated or when those mutations have caused changes in transmission.

And what do you base that claim on? I note that none of these organisms are native to humanity and have come since the advent of civilization, a relatively recent period for humanity. They've mutated just to jump from their normal animal reservoir to humans.

So do you have a point to this post? I gave four counterexamples and you seem to have something irrelevant to say about each one.

My counterexamples show this claim is false. I admit that some of them are bacterial diseases rather than viruses, I missed that bit of your original post. But aside from that, I have yet to see a reason why you should continue to disagree with me.

Unless the change in isotope species didn't happen say because the original sample was switched out with another sample with a different isotope mix. As an aside, a suspicious aspect of the problem is the supposed near total conversion of the original sample into nickel-62. Having a prototype with that sort of fuel efficiency is rather unlikely IMHO. But I'm prepared to be surprised. It just needs to be done with something other than a staged affair.

Sure, you can. If there was a way to violate conservation of energy with simple table top setups and mundane physics, we would have seen it by now.

Then you're probably doing something wrong. Seriously, this is the huge problem with fringe science. It is very hard to test conservation of energy especially in the open systems that traditionally give the appearance of breaking conservation of energy (by shifting energy in and out of the outside world).

For example, Ebola has made this transition to airborne transmission before. Influenza has been transmitted by diarrhea before. Bubonic Plague is another disease that has managed the transition to airborne transmission.

And of course, AIDS was readily transmitted by blood transfusion and shared needle use even though that's not its original mode of transmission.

So there's four examples right there, including Ebola itself.

The current bout of Ebola is of larger extent than than all previous incidents combined. And even if it did infect everyone over time with current lethality, there would still be 30-50% survival rate.

Because nothing ever changes. We have several examples throughout history of novel diseases making their way into vulnerable human populations such as various historical plagues, colonization of the New World, and AIDS. I hope that this bout of Ebola becomes just another odd footnote in history. But it has already passed a key hurdle to becoming a pandemic and infected several urban populations - something no other known Ebola flareup has done.

It's evidence backed by well known disease dynamics (the worst case being in the absence of treatment or behavior changes of vulnerable populations, the logistics curve with exponential growth in the beginning saturating as everyone eventually gets the disease and survivors acquire immunity to it). And the extrapolation is based on up to nine months of data not two data points.

Continued growth opens up two near future unpleasant possibilities. First, that there are just a lot more cases than present. And second, that the disease becomes endemic in Africa among human populations, that is, the disease can't be eradicated without large scale and costly efforts similar to say those for eradicating polio or smallpox.

Either possibility increases the likelihood that the disease mutates to become airborne which is a far more dangerous transmission mode of infection than via skin contact.

The evidence is continued exponential growth of Ebola to recent past. It appears that the rate of infection may be slowing down in the worst of the three primary countries of infection, Liberia. If true, fears of pandemic are overstated.

If instead, cases continue to climb exponentially, but patients are staying away from hospitals, then you still have the eventual pandemic problem looming on the horizon.

Hypocrisy is not the worst sin. It does matter that China is much worse than the UK in terms of suppression of free speech.

There's the loophole. I bet with proper timing on the appropriate course they can consistently get that to happen.

The thing that gets missed is that it's very contagious once it gets in your body. From the article:

And if a mutation should cause it to be spreadable through the air, then well, it's going to become more contagious.

He DIDN'T deny the questions at the hospital.

But do you really think he told the hospital that he had considerable physical contact with a likely Ebola victim in Liberia? Supposedly he and several neighbors had carried a very sick woman to a car and then to some sort of clinic where they were turned away. The woman and several of the neighbors died later of Ebola. He meanwhile suddenly ends up in Texas conveniently before the end of the incubation period.

As I see it, he probably lied on three occasions, first to get out of Liberia, then to everyone he was staying with in Texas, and then to the hospital the first time he showed up there.

And another sign that this is just noise: amateur pop psychology - or what we in the amateur pop psychology circlejerk call "psychological projection".