THE EBOLA GAMBLE: How Public Health Authorities Put Reassurance Before Protection. “In December 2014 and February 2015, after public attention to Ebola had waned, two medical articles quietly appeared that exhaustively summarized the available literature on how Ebola is transmitted. In the gently descriptive language of scientists, these papers walked through most of the CDC’s and the World Health Organization’s major claims about Ebola — that it cannot be transmitted via water supplies, sewage, or the air; that its maximum incubation period is 21 days; that patients are contagious only when symptomatic — and showed how each, though stated definitively on posters and in public statements by the CDC and the WHO, was not only based on fragmentary evidence, but had evidence to qualify or contradict it.”