I looked up the symptoms to the Ebola virus.... · 1:30am Oct 15th, 2014
The stupid thing is, I've had symptoms like the ones listed in the early stages list in the past:
What are the symptoms?
Fever, headache, joint and muscle pain, sore throat and intense muscle weakness within 21 days after being infected, with symptoms usually occurring within 5-7 days.
Diarrhoea, vomiting, a rash, stomach pain and impaired kidney and liver function follow before severe internal bleeding, and the patient may also bleed from the ears, eyes, nose or mouth.
Something else I read said if you had a temp of over 101 F. (something) degrees that you might be infected. Again, I've had THIS in the past, as well. The highest my temp got was 108 degrees F. No, I'm not joking. I almost died of a fever when I was 14. Felt like I was floating even while lying down or sitting. It was annoying. Cold and wet washcloth to the forehead felt WONDERFUL.
Back on topic, never all at once though.
Let me be clear so no one freaks out: as far as I know, NO I'm not infected.
I had just been hearing a bunch of stuff about it on the news lately (seems to be all they can talk about these days) and thought I should look up the symptoms. I guess I won't know whether I'm infected for sure or not until the 'it's too late' symptoms show up. Go figure.
to any of you out there who know someone who IS infected, God bless you.
What is infuriating, is that when I was learning about various diseases in health class, for almost every single one, I had, at least in the past, had symptoms matching them.
2533431
Makes it kinda hard to tell when you've got something lethal that if caught early enough could have been treated, huh?
Ebola has the same effect as any other flu bug because it's your own body making you sick, not the virus. No seriously. The body's reaction to any viral pathogen is to have all those symptoms. It's a primitive form of immune response that attempts to simply make the body inhospitable to anything, to drive out that which is invading. The body stops this primitive immune response with a newer sophisticated immune response by sending out cells to analyze the pathogen, and report back to lymph nodes where other cells design antibodies to disable the virus. What makes Ebola different is that it is very effective at infecting these analyzing cells, which keeps them from reporting to C&C, which keeps the basic immune response from turning off.
You do not want to keep this immune response from turning off.
They call it the "cytokine storm." Anything can trigger it, from Ebola to SARS, to even simple allergies. Ebola is very good (90% chance) of triggering it and preventing it from being turned off, but the virus doesn't contain any code to directly hurt us at all. Without the antibody response to turn it off, the body will melt its own blood vessels with caustic acid just to kill whatever got in. Ebola is just sort of along for the ride at that point, and it's the stupidity of our proto-immune system that causes us to die in messy disease spreading ways.
2545703
So it's unintentional suicide?
...
I can't come up with a joke to make out of that.
2546004
I think life is enough of a joke by itself.
2546004 The body also commits to intentional suicide at one point in everyone's life, at least for the people who live long enough. Aging related death is completely programmed, and there is no true reason it needs to happen. None. The only reason it happens is a side effect of natural selection only working on creatures who pass on genes, so people who breed and died of old age and people who breed and died of something else both equally breed at the same times. Because of this, almost no living creature evolved to be biologically immortal, because it never made them more fit to breed. I say almost because there is this stupid jellyfish that is technically biologically immortal.
It's a bit (A lot) more complicated than that, but that is the basic reason why.