Since Professor Lydia Bourouiba’s research has shown that small droplets produced by sneezing and coughing could spread much farther than had been realized, MIT News asked her how the findings could apply to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. She noted that very little fundamental mechanistic research has been done since the 1970s to support current claims and recommendations about Ebola transmission routes. The constant threat of emerging pathogens makes it important to “fundamentally revisit our understanding of disease transmission from one host to the next,” and it is critical to “incorporate fundamental physical processes, such as fluid dynamic processes, on the modeling of such mechanisms,” she said. Read the MIT News story.