Ebola outbreak: Liberia shuts most border points

[Divernan]

45. For ebola, possible but not likely; HIV is a different story.

If you google Ebola, mutate and airborne, you'll get a lot of links, some of them pure speculation, others more science-based. Since HIV is a retrovirus, it mutates more frequently than ebola.
Based on my ONE course from a very good microbiologist, I think it's unlikely but possible. I'm no scientist - just a layman trying to understand the situation for this and other deadly diseases.

Here's one piece I found well-written:
http://www.skyalgae.info/Home/how-do-virusese-mutate-and-become-airborne
(excerpt)

In general, most viruses don't mutate that often. Notable exceptions are the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the Influenza Virus (Flu). HIV is a retrovirus (it has a "reverse transcriptase" enzyme that enables it to convert its RNA into a complimentary DNA that can "integrate" into the host genes. This is often a situation that results in frequent mutations due to gene sequence "reading errors." The Flu virus also mutates frequently. However, virologists and epidemiologists have found that this RNA virus changes by two mechanisms. One mechanism is by reassorting or recombining. There are many flu viruses and each has a host range specificity. That there are flu viruses that only infect animals of a given species like pigs, ducks and humans. However, passage of a duck flu virus through a pig or vice versa sometimes results in genetic adaptation through reassortment or recombination genes so it becomes infectious in humans. Therefore, monitoring duck and pig flu viruses in addition to human cases are some of the things the CDC does to determine what antigens should be in the next vaccine. In addition to these kinds of big changes in flu virus genes, there are also minor point mutation changes that cause "antigenic drift" so the virus of the same type is slightly different antigenically and can escape elimination by the body's immune response to that type's vaccine.
(It then goes on to discuss airborne)

The ostensibly responsible media are not immune to the temptation to stir these fears. In a May 12 editorial, the New York Times declared: "A modest genetic change might enable Ebola to spread rapidly through the air..."

That very same day, in the news section, Times reporter Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., handled the matter more soberly. Reporting from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, he wrote, "The deadly Ebola virus continues to spread in Zaire, chiefly affecting health care workers... [It] apparently spread initially among [doctors] and nurses who operated on a patient in Kikwit." Dr. Altman, an infectious-disease specialist who once worked at the CDC, added, "Transmission presumably was through contaminated blood..."

Can a bloodborne or body fluid-borne virus be transformed by a single mutation into an airborne agent (a "flyer&quot , as the scare scenarios imply? It's conceivable. But it's "probably unlikely," according to virologist Beth Levine, M.D., director of virology research in the infectious diseases division at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. "Single amino acid mutations can change the tropism [the residential preference] of a virus" in some experimental situations, Dr. Levine says, "but there haven't been any examples of such mutations actually occurring in nature, changing a virus from a bloodborne or bodily fluid route of transmission to a respiratory route."

So, says Dr. Levine, "The media's claim is not totally without scientific basis. But there are no precedents for it, and it's unlikely.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-1.2/Ebola.htm