"I wouldn't be worried to sit next to someone with Ebola virus on the Tube as long as they don't vomit on you or something," Peter Piot, who is now the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Agence France Presse.

"This is an infection that requires very close contact," he said.

The United States is currently transporting one or two Ebola patients, likely the American aid workers infected with the disease, to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

However, as the hospital has explained, doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff who work on such dangerous cases are "specially trained," and a statement from Emory indicated that the hospital and its staff were "fully prepared for this type of situation."

This outbreak has been called "totally out of control" by the director of operations of Doctors Without Borders, but Ebola is not transmitted via the air, like the flu, and can be contained with proper medical procedures. Piot explained that in West Africa, other factors ? such as distrust in authorities and in Western medicine ? are driving this epidemic.

Ebola is also only considered contagious once it is symptomatic.