Ebola's not Over; Cause of Ebola Outbreak Recently Identified

It looks like patient zero of the deadliest ebola outbreak in human history has been identified. (Although, this should not be confused with the outbreak in the DRC, from Aug-Nov of last year. Though simultaneous to the other current outbreak, this strain and outbreak has been determined unrelated to the West African one.) Doctors have traced the virus back to a toddler who played with a fruit bat in late 2013, dying in early December of unidentified causes. His mother, sister and grandmother would soon follow in his footsteps, with villagers from neighboring villages coming in to pay respects to his grandmother. In spite of the fact she not patient zero, this funeral would wind up being the catalyst that lead to the deadly outbreak. Funerals in West Africa are "superspreader" events for such diseases, so much so that 60% of all the reported case in Guinea stem directly from a funeral. Many who attended that funeral died from it in the following weeks after bringing it to their own villages.

Washing the nightmares away

How does ebola kill you?

It isn't fucking pleasant, this disease is literally nightmare fuel. Ebola gives you EHF, Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. This starts out by having the virus attack our immune system and kill off your t-lymphocytes, or t-cells, the same thing AIDS does. The virus releases proteins that stop your immune system from sending out anti-bodies. Then it gets into your collagen.

Those are ready to pop, and full of ebola.

I don't know how well you know biology, but collagen is important, making up 25-35% of all the protein in your body. It's all the fibers that make up connective tissue. If you've ever dissected a mammal in a biology class, you know how much fucking connective tissue we have. Every square inch of skin has connective tissue on the bottom of it, keeping it in your insides. Your muscles all have connective tissue, your tendons are made out of connective tissue. You can hydrolize it to make gelatin. You can also boil horses to harvest their collagen for glue, which is where the name comes from (κόλλα, or colla-, greek for glue, and γεν, or -gen, for "producing").

So ebola hangs out in your collagen and eats it. So now your entire skin is barely hanging on, instead of being anchored down, it's floating on a small layer of liquefied collagen remnants. Your entire skin breaks out in red and white blisters that can be ripped open with almost no effort. And of course, they're full of ebola-laden fluids. Parts of you just start to rip open. This is why people bleeding out of the mouth, nose, ears, gums, and all other orifices is common.

What's left of your immune system will cause coagulation in your blood, leading to clots getting stuck in tons of small capillaries are vessels. Not only does this lead to blockages, it causes many of them to burst. Your fever is awful, your body is ripping itself apart, and you're just having a bad time at this point.

But wait, there's more!

Once the virus makes it's way into your organs, it REALLY gets down to trying to kill you. Your blood stops coagulating once the damages are done, because ebola will destroy the glands in the liver required for making coagulants and plasma. It attacks your adrenal glands, which can no longer produce the steroids to regulate blood pressure. Your cells are dying and sloughing off, in both an uncontrollable diarrhea consisting of regular diarrhea AND the liquefied remains of the dead parts of your GI tract, and vomiting the same piling up in your stomach. Your skin is falling off, as is parts of the inside of you esophagus. It is said the most painful part of ebola is when the skin on your tongue sloughs off. By now, your blood hasn't coagulated because you can't make the proteins for it, and your blood cells are bursting at the seams with the virus, so everywhere you've begun to bleed out of, you just don't stop. That's when you die.

This brings us back to the tradition of funerals in West Africa. It often includes practices like washing the body, touching the body, or even kissing the body. Some affected cultures, like the Kissi, believe in certain parts of the natural cycle of life and death, and believe that burying a mother with a dead, unborn fetus disrupts such a cycle. Removing the fetus is the only culturally acceptable thing to do here, but the medical professionals insisted that it was unnecessary and way too dangerous to attempt, due to the body being an ebola bomb. 

Although in this situation, a compromise was worked out with a witch doctor who sacrificed a goat, oil, salt and kola nuts, it was an unnecessary step in separating the dead from the living; yet as an outcome, it was the exception. Medical workers trying to fight the outbreak have been routinely attacked and even killed for trying to fight this outbreak, where villagers would then flee like terrified animals into the jungle with their loved yet infected ones. Traditions were upkept, the outbreak would continue.

Last October, USSOUTHCOM put this out, stating that they were worried that an outbreak in the Americas would prove deadly and overwhelming for the United States. They specifically named human trafficking rings from West Africa who take people to the Caribbean as a massive threat. The disease, should it spread to  the Caribbean or to Central America, would leave a horde of immigrants clamoring their way up to our country. The infection wouldn't be the biggest of our worries at that point.

Also, the infection hasn't ended yet. Though Nigeria, Liberia and Senegal have declared the outbreak officially eradicated (it has been over 40 days since the last infection took place, well outside the 21 days incubation period), it's still ravaging Guinea and Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone has imposed a curfew designed to keep people indoors 12 hours a day, enforced by soldiers, so that people cannot continue to smuggle things, especially bodies they want to bury, and continue to propagate the infection. Just because our media isn't talking about it and using the outbreak and the disappearance of MH370 has major, distractifying stories, doesn't mean it's still going on. 

Until the outbreak is completely contained, we can fall back to square one at any time, where thousands of new infections are taking place every day.