The media today is all up in arms since Mr. Duncan died of
Ebola in Texas. I, for one, do not understand why anyone is shocked. He had a
disease with an average 70% fatality rate. There was a pretty good chance that he was
going to wind up dead. Let’s stop traumatizing the poor man’s friends and
family by airing his death on every bloody news channel, ya?
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Let’s talk about why this thing is killing so many people,
despite excellent levels of health care here in America and Europe. Mr. Ebola is going to
walk us through how he makes you sick.
Symptoms you might have Mr. Ebola:
1.
FEVER: Fever goes along with a lot of viruses.
Here’s why- Mr. Ebola hangs out in your blood stream infecting and killing
cells of the vessel walls AND white blood cells inside the vessels. Your white
blood cell warriors aren’t taking this sitting down though. They are kicking
and screaming and putting up a fight. Their little screams and battle cries come
in the form of Cytokines. Little molecules that are cells’ way of talking to
each other. White blood cells love to scream in the tune of “Tumor Necrosis
Factor” when viruses are invading. There are many types of TNF, but TNF Alpha gets right to your brainstem. And your brainstem, upon hearing the
little molecular screams for help, decides it’s going to try to burn the virus
out by cranking up the heat. See most viruses can only reproduce at certain
body temperatures. Outside their happy range, they slow down and the white
blood cells have a chance to kill them and gain the upper hand. But Mr. Ebola doesn’t
give a shit if you crank the heat up a few degrees; he’s just going to happily
continue his murderous rampage through your body. Meanwhile, your brainstem
doesn’t know what it is doing isn’t working, so it just keeps on with the
program.
 |
| It's like American Psycho with less Christian Bale... |
2.
Vomiting and Diarrhea: Mr. Ebola can infect your
liver cells along with the blood vessels that feed and nourish all of your
gastrointestinal organs. These liver cells start dying left and right releasing
all sorts of nasty chemicals they should be detoxing for you. Dead cells+ nasty
toxic soup+ bleeding into your gut from leaky blood vessels = really pissed off
nerves in your gut. These pissed off nerves are going to feed back into the
automatic part of your brain to tell you that you feel like crap, you’re really
nauseous and putting food in your impaired stomach might not be a good idea.
Because Mr. Ebola is going around slaughtering cells and destroying vascular
pathways. All that blood and stuff leaking in your gut is nasty and your body
tries to flush it out with diarrhea, much to Ebola’s joy as it slides right out
of you into the next host. Losing all that fluid is going to make you quite
dehydrated, and if you get too dehydrated you’ll go into hypotensive shock,
because your body can’t afford to lose any more fluid and is running on empty.
And if you are really unlucky, all those
dead liver cells will lead to the next thing...
3.
Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation aka 'DIC': So your liver produces clotting factors to help keep
your blood not too thick and not too thin. The nice medium porridge viscosity. When Mr. Ebola slaughters
the liver, you start running low on clotting factors and the chemicals that turn clotting off. And now your blood
proceeds into an impaired ability to clot on both ends of the spectrum. A tip, your blood vessels routinely sustain
small injuries that your body patches up on its own. Start running low on
clotting factors, and you can’t keep up with the daily damage. Start running low on Anti-Clotting factors and you'll be throwing clots where there should be none. The next thing
you know, you’re bleeding out of your eyeballs. And losing even more blood is
going to drop your blood pressure so low you’re dead before you know it…
4.
Severe headache/confusion: So the rest of your
brain doesn’t like being dehydrated/low on blood, cooked alive by fever and
roasted in angry white blood cell Cytokines. Its response is to try to tell you
to slow the heck down and go rest so you can spend your energy fighting off
infection instead of working. That’s pretty much what a headache is, unhappy
over-taxed brain cells. The more unhappy, hot and worn out they get, the
crummier your ability to think becomes. Eventually you’re delusional,
staggering about and falling out of your bed. This makes Mr. Ebola happy
because you are too disoriented to try to warn others you’re a plague bomb who
has diarrhea running down its leg.
5.
Muscle pain/weakness: Your muscles can’t really
do their best if you are feverish, dehydrated and drowning in a sea of dead
white blood cells. They are a helpless bystander watching all of the carnage
wash up on their shores.
6.
Organ Failure: Eventually the rest of your
organs just can’t take it anymore. Imagine living in a toxic waste dump. That
is what Mr. Ebola has turned your body into. The sea of inflammatory Cytokines,
the waves of dead cell debris and the complete lack of a decent blood pressure
has starved the rest of your body into giving up the ghost. The nastiest image
of the Gulf of Mexico after an oil spill is nothing compared to your body. And Mr. Ebola still wins, because he can hang out in your dead meat
sack and infect someone who gets exposed to your rotting dead tissues and
fluids. What an A-Hole.
-Dr. M
Enjoyed reading your blog.
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