The Ebola VirusBy Jack Allnutt and Adam Phelan

What is Ebola?

Ebola is a virus that causes severe disease in humans and (experimentally) in nonhuman primates in the form of viral Hemorrhagic Fever.

The first Ebola outbreak was thought to be near the Ebola river in Zaire, Africa, giving it it’s name.

What does the Ebola Virus attack?

The Ebola Virus attacks:

The Nervous System

The Skin

The Circulatory System Ebola can suppress both the innate and adaptive immune systems quite effectively, which is why mortality is so high.

How does Ebola cause bleeding?

• Hemorrhagic Fever causes bleeding through a process called Disseminated intravascular coagulation (or DIC).

• This process activates certain blood-clotting mechanisms which disrupt normal blood clotting and causes the body to abnormally bleed out blood. In other words, the blood vessels swell until they cannot contain any more blood, and they burst, causing the body to bleed uncontrollably.

Effects of Ebola

• The first signs of Ebola are headaches, which usually start to occur two days after one is exposed to the virus.

• Then you become nauseated, spike a fever, and vomit until you are basically dry-heaving. After this, your face turns into that of a zombie, most people will get bruises all over their body and your eyes will turn red. Blood clots will occur all over the inside of the infected body, and with this, their mood will become angrier towards everything.

• Then the skin of the body appears to have one, continuous bruise because of the dead spots in your organs.

• The skin later becomes soft and pulpy, the mouth bleeds, and the surface of the tongue falls off.

• One will then begin to vomit again, but instead of food come chunks of dead stomach and esophagus cells and blood.

• Then the lining of the throat and wind pipe are expelled and the eyes weep blood.

• Strokes may occur.• The heart begins to bleed, the lining of

the bowels open, and blood flows out of the anus.

• The testicles may swell to the size of grapefruits, and the spleen swells to the size of a baseball.

• All of the brain damage makes people become delirious, which leads the victim to go into shock and die.

What does the Ebola Virus do to our immune systems?

• The Ebola virus masks the RNA in our cells, so that the cell does not recognize the invading virus or the fact that it is currently replicating and causing harm to you body.

Outbreaks

• The first major outbreak of Ebola occurred in Athens Greece, in 430 BCE, during the Peloponnesian War. The epidemic killed over 500,000 people and was widely recorded.

• One of the most recent and most serious outbreaks of Ebola was in 1976 in the town of N’zara, Sudan. This epidemic killed 300 people and then two months later, in Bumba, Zaire, 500 people died from another strain.

How is Ebola transferred?• The Ebola virus is spread within a close

proximity of an Ebola victim through the blood.

• Ebola can be spread if the blood gets into an orifice (hole or gap) or open cut of a person, or if someone comes in close proximity of the blood of the victim.

• This can be easily brought about, however, because in the end stages of Ebola, blood leaks out of every pore.

Today• Now, many cures have been brought up, but

none of them prove to be completely effective.

• Once symptoms occur, the victim will most likely die.

• The good news is that Ebola is very rare, and is mostly contained to small villages in Africa.

• A new drug has been found recently that has cured many infected monkeys, but has not yet been tested on humans, and Ebola is also a constantly changing virus.

THE END!