CNN news 2015-03-22 加文本

cnn news 2015-03-22

CARL AZUZ, HOST: Yesterday was election day in Israel. It`s a Middle Eastern nation of almost eight million people. It`s only slightly larger than New Jersey, but the vote was watched around the world.

This will determine the makeup of the Israeli parliament, called the Knesset. That will determine who will be Israel`s prime minister. It could impact the nation`s security, economy, its relationships with other countries in the Middle East and with Western nations, including the US.

cnn does not have any official estimates of the outcome, but a major Israeli TV channel indicated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu`s party had a one seat lead over that of his main challenger, Isaac Hertzog. While two other TV channels estimated their parties to be neck and neck.

Israelis don`t vote directly for their prime minister. They choose the parties that ultimately determine the country`s leader. You can find a full explainer on Israel`s Knesset in Monday`s edition of cnn STUDENT NEWS.

Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, three nations in West Africa that have been hardest hit with last year`s outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus. Of the estimated 24,300 people who have caught it, almost 10,000 have died. The virus also threatens medical workers, anyone who has been in contact with the body fluids of an Ebola victim.

An American health care worker who caught Ebola in Sierra Leone is being treated at a National Institutes of Health facility in Maryland. The patient is said to be in critical condition.

Several of the worker`s colleagues, people who had contact with the sick person, are now being monitored in the US. They`re not sick, but they`ve likely been exposed.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, cnn CORRESPONDENT: It`s probably the question we got more than any other...

Is Ebola Airborne?

GUPTA: The answer is no, it`s not, but today I want to take just a couple of minutes and show you why not. I think you`re going to find this really interesting.

A lot of viruses, when they`re circulating through the air, if you breathe them in, part of the reason they actually make you sick is because they stick to your airways. Just imagine this is your airway, for example. And this is one of those viruses. Put that in there and pour it through, it`s actually staying.

Imagine that virus now staying in your lungs.

Ebola, though, doesn`t act that way. It`s not as sticky. So even if you were to breathe in an Ebola virus -- it might look something like this -- and put it through your airway here, watch what happens.

It goes right through. It doesn`t stick in your airway, and that`s why it`s not airborne. It doesn`t make you sick.

There`s another reason Ebola isn`t airborne, either. And I want to show you this. When you think about cold viruses or flu viruses, oftentimes they act a bit like a powder. Think of that. If this powder is sort of in the air, people can breathe it in, but they can also live on surfaces for days, even weeks. That`s, in part, what makes it airborne.

Instead, with Ebola, it`s much more like this baseball. If you think about a baseball, you could put this in the air, as well, but see what`s going to happen pretty quickly, it`s just going to drop to the ground and it`s not going to get anybody sick.