Your Immune System Is Deadlier Than You Think

In December 2013 a two-year-old boy in East Guinea was bitten by a fruit bat and within a week the boy and his mother were dead. This started the beginning of the Ebola outbreak that’s currently spreading across West Africa.  On NPR this week, Michaeleen Doucleff explains exactly how Ebola kills people, saying, “The virus isn’t what ends up killing you, it’s your own immune system.”

To understand how the virus kills you, we first need to figure out what Ebola is. Ebola is a deadly disease that causes “fever, muscle pain, headaches and a sore throat followed by vomiting, diarrhea, rash, impaired kidney and internal (and sometimes external) bleeding.” Figure 1 is a 3D recreation of the Ebola virus.

                                                              (Figure 1 - Ebola)

Now, normally your immune system gets rid of diseases, but when a deadly disease becomes out of control, the immune system activates a cytokine storm, a last-ditch effort to stop the virus. However more often than not this ends up hurting the body rather than helping it. Usually the after effects of this attack cause blood and plasma from the arteries, veins, and capillaries to leak into the bloodstream and damage the blood vessels. Leading to dangerously low blood levels and that’s what eventually causes death.  However when the Ebola  virus enters the body it infects Dendric cells (used to make antibodies) but it does so without being noticed, then the virus starts to multiply uncontrollably, and eventually it ends up overtaking the body and death occurs.

Nearly 2,000 people have died worldwide and over 3,000 are infected with the virus. At the moment there is no cure for Ebola but there is hope for the future, with some drugs being in experimental and developmental stages. Doctors and politicians continue to debate when the drugs should be ready for use.

Sources:

here,  here, and here