Hospital: US Ebola patient in critical condition

[uppityperson]

13. ARGH! Your organs do not "liquify"

Your body makes lots of little blood clots that plug up capillaries leading to no blood flow to parts of organs. This kills those parts of the organs. Liver, kidneys, brain, digestive tract, etc.

Parts of the lining of your digestive tract can slough off when it is dead. But it is not liquified.

Because the body has made so many blood clots in inappropriate places, you then can bleed easily. The blood vessels leading into those parts have open ends and can bleed. Anywhere you bump gets bruised, and the bruised grow quickly on your skin. And inside your body.

http://www.africareview.com/Special-Reports/-/979182/1472576/-/vhdyxoz/-/index.html

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There have been claims that Ebola liquifies the body organs of infected people, but Dr Mbabazi disagrees. Instead, he says that Ebola interferes with the clotting and bleeding mechanisms of the body.

“The symptoms are initially non-specific, but liver function may be impaired, blood clotting functions (coagulation) are dysregulated, septic shock and multi-organ failure occurs in most cases that eventually die,” Dr Mbabazi says.

Handshakes have also been said to be a fertile ground for the spread of Ebola. Or aren’t they?Dr Mbabazi agrees because hands easily get contaminated when they get in contact with infected material like sweat, vomit, stool, urine, blood, or any other body fluid. Such materials can be picked by the hand in a hand shake directly or inadvertently from door handles, tables, and chairs.”

On whether victims wear zombie-like faces, infectious disease expert Dr Philippe Calain says: “At the end of the disease the patient does not look, from the outside, as horrible as you can read in some books. They are not melting. They are not full of blood. They’re in shock, muscular shock. They are not unconscious, but you would say ‘obtunded’, dull, quiet, very tired.”...

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1996-05/833458824.Vi.r.html
Posted by Tom Wilson Grade level: M.D./PhD, Pathology, Div. of Molecular Oncology, Washington University Medical School

Question 1: Ebola does NOT cause the body to liquefy! I wish I knew
where this description of the disease comes from. Ebola does cause a
large degree of tissue destruction in many parts of the body. We call
this tissue destruction "inflammation". But it is fundamentally no
different than the kind of destruction that occurs in, say, the common
cold. This is exactly how your body fights the infection. Unfortunately,
the inflammation can sometimes hurt you as much as it helps fight the
infection. Part of inflammation is that tissues become leaky to fluid
(why your nose runs), and this is compounded in Ebola infection since the
virus is infecting (and killing) the cells of the blood vessels (see below),
and so there is an even greater leakiness that results in frank bleeding.
This results in the very powerful image of an infected person, since they
have a bloody drainage at the eyes, nose, mouth, etc., and leads to the name
for this disease, which is "hemorrhagic (i.e. bleeding) fever". But this
idea that the internal organs turn to liquid is absurd. They are merely
having the same kind of inflammation occurring, which does cause fluid
accumulation and severe tissue destruction, but again, it is nothing as
fanciful what you have been led to believe.

As for the clotting, part of the bodies normal response to a damaged
blood vessel is to form a clot there, to stop the bleeding. A clot is a
solidification of the the liquid components of blood, and is thus a
fundamentally different process from the inflammation that is causing the
fluid leakiness.

Question 2: Ebola virus does NOT infect every cell in the body! Again,
I wish I knew where this idea came from. Ebola infects almost exclusively
the cells that line the insides of your blood vessels - we call them
"endothelial cells". Since all parts of your body have blood vessels,
of course, all *parts* of the body (skin, organs, brain, etc.) can get
infected. This is certainly part of why Ebola infection is so severe -
by infecting only one cell type, the whole body can be damaged. It is
also part of why Ebola can spread about the body so quickly - as soon
as virus gets released from a dying cell, it finds itself in the bloodstream
where it can now be pumped all over the body very fast.

As far as Ebola being a filovirus - it is called this simply because
it shares certain features with some related viruses - the details are
not important. But like all viruses, what Ebola has to do is to get
into the body, bind to the surface of the cell it infects, get into the
cell, make more of the virus, and then get back out of the cell to start
the cycle over again (which for most viruses kills the cell). This
process is certainly fascinating, but Ebola is not doing anything
fundamentally different than any other virus.