An epidemiology question

What sort of mutation would allow the Marburg virus to turn into a global pandemic in the second half of the 20th century?

If the virus were given a longer incubation period, so victims could spread it without showing symptoms, would that be enough?
 
World Health Organization said:
Transmission of the virus from person to person requires extremely close contact with a patient. Infection results from contact with blood or other body fluids (faeces, vomitus, urine, saliva, and respiratory secretions) with high virus concentration, especially when these fluids contain blood. Transmission via infected semen can occur up to seven weeks after clinical recovery.

Infection through casual contact is thought to be exceedingly rare. The low rate of transmission to persons with casual contact suggests that aerosol transmission via the respiratory tract is not efficient, if it occurs at all. Transmission does not occur during the incubation period.

I'm not an expert, but I think you'd need a much more effective transmission method to get a real pandemic. And note that victims are not contagious during the incubation period.
 
Thanks. If I decide to do this TL, it sounds like it would be simpler to "invent" a new filovirus than to mutate Marburg that much.
 
I'm certainly no expert, but IIRC, in general, the more contagious a disease is the less deadly it is.

Indeed, there is such a thing as too deadly of a disease. Ebola had that problem, it's a flash in the pan, kills too quickly to effectively spread. That airborne strain in Reston mutated out of being a human disease.
 
Indeed, there is such a thing as too deadly of a disease. Ebola had that problem...
I wouldn't characterize that as a "problem", unless the extirpation of a majority of humanity is the object.

If it is, such a disease would not only be highly contagious and highly lethal, it would have a relatively slow disease progress (compared to Ebola or Marburg) and would be contagious at an early stage, when there were no symptoms or when symptoms were easily confused with a common cold or other minor disease.

A likely candidate would be a strain of particularly deadly influenza, like that of 1919. This is one reason so much effort is put into identifying new influenza strains early and developing vaccines for them.
 
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