Ebola virus

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Do you know what countries was he in?

Before clicking on this thread I thought the question was going to be ''are Aspies more likely to get the Ebola virus?'' and I was ready to panic!

But, yes, I'm worried about the virus too. It seems there always seems to be some sort of virus out there to worry about. But, I have learnt a valuable lesson with these viruses. When the Swine flu was all over the media and was apparently sweeping the whole world, it created many panic attacks with me. I kept on clinging to my dad crying my eyes out because I was worried about him getting it, as he's asthmatic and I read that people with some sort of lung condition can die of Swine flu, then when I read somewhere else that nearly everybody's likely to get it, that really threw me into the sofa and got me crying my eyes out in a massive panic. The anxiety went on throughout most of 2009, and they kept on mentioning it on the radio, and it just terrified me. Then when the winter came (it was a very cold winter that year, I can tell you!) everybody, including me, was all like ''oh my God a lot of people are going to be coming down with this Swine flu now!'' And they sent round these leaflets about it through the door, like it was some sort of pandemic, and everybody was freaking out whenever somebody announced they had symptoms of a cold. But the cold winter came and went, and the Swine flu wasn't really mentioned any more, only a few times, and then throughout 2010 I sort of forgot about it. Then at the end of 2010 I heard the Swine flu was back, which got me panicking again, but then it died down again and I haven't really heard about it since. So now when there's a deadly virus going about I try not to let it worry me any more, because I am not doing all that panicking again, only to hear no more about it after a while.

Autistics are naturally immune to Ebola.

Just kidding.

But back to OP. If they were in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea (<- mainly) or Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, it would be prudent to take some precautions, but all that would be necessary is no close contact at all with the person or sharing objects. A person is only contagious when they are actually showing symptoms themselves, so if your uncle is fine when you see them, it is not really an issue.

Somehow I would guess those are not typical backpack destinations, which I more associate with east Africa (ie. Kenya).

As people have mentioned before it is not something you can catch just from being in same room as someone who has it. It is not able (yet) to travel airborne on its own. A few mutations down the line might change that, but its not likely.

NYTIMES.COM: "What We?re Afraid to Say About Ebola" (September 11, 2014)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/opini ... ebola.html

No matter how it is transmitted, worrying about it certainly is not going to make a difference in that. I know it's easier said than done but all worry does it make us more stressed and weakens us to resist anything thus making us more prone to everything. But there are thousands of viruses all around us, some are worse than Ebola so we just have to live our lives and do the best we can to stay healthy and if we catch something we go to the hospital and deal with it then. But if you knew all the viruses that are around us and you worried and got frantic about every one of them, you would need a sterile bubble to live in.