$aff|1-The Ebola Virus



$fff                           By Zebedee/Carnage

$afaThe  Ebola virus had its publicity a while back both in the tabloids and
on  television,  then  died out just as quickly as it appeared.  In fact
that  encounter in 1993 wasn't the first time Ebola had been discovered.
It was first encountered back in 1967 - and there is still NO cure!

$faaWhat is it?  Its a virus that takes as few as 28 days to kill its victim
by  reducing  their  insides to pulp.  Because its a virus like AIDS is,
antibiotics  don't  work  and  it  isn't  possible to immunise people by
giving them vaccinations.

$afaAnyone  read  the  book,  `The Hot Zone' which is about the Ebola virus?
There  is  part  of  a chapter which describes what an Ebola victim goes
through  from  when they catch it upto when they die.  It does NOT sound
very  nice  and if I caught it and there was no known cure - I'd go down
to the station and play chicken with the trains.

$faaThe way the Ebola works is very different from the AIDS virus in the way
that it tries to convert the host into the virus itself.  This of course
is not possible as humans, as we know them need to breathe in air.  What
the  virus  does  to  our  insides is just like putting your guts into a
blender for a few minutes - it reduces them to slush.

$afaThere  was an outbreak in Africa back in 1993 where the Ebola virus took
over a whole village.  That village was quarantined and I can't remember
the  outcome  of  the  event  but I do remember the massive coverage the
tabloids gave it.

$faaThe  way  the  AIDS  virus  works is to destroy the immune system.  This
increases  the chances of dying from something so simple like the common
cold  because  the immune system that counter attacks the cold virus has
been  destroyed  by  the  AIDS virus.  A person can carry AIDS for a few
years  before  they die.  With the Ebola virus the carrier dies around a
month of contacting it.

$afaStarting  on  page  44  of  the  book The Hot Zone it describes a person
called  Charles  Monet  and  the  effects of the virus up until it kills
him...

$afaThe  headache begins, typically on the seventh day after exposure to the
agent.   He felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs.  The headache got
worse and won't go away with painkillers.  Then he got backache.  On the
third day after his headache started, he bacame nauseous, spiked a fever
and  began  to  vomit.   His  vomiting  grew intense and turned into dry
heaves.

$faaHis   face   lost  all  appearance  of  life  and  set  itself  into  an
expressionless  mask,  with  the  eyeballs fixed, paralytic and staring.
The eyelids were droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance, as if his
eyes were popping out of his head and half clsoed at the same time.  The
eyeballs  themselves seemed half frozen in their sockets and they turned
bright red.  The skin of his face turned yellowish and began to resemble
Limburger  cheese,  with  brilliant  starlife red speckles.  He began to
look like a zombie.

$afaHe  became  sullen,  resentful,  angry and his memory seemed to be blown
away.   He  was  not  delirious.  He could answer questions, although he
didn't  seem  to know exactly where he was.  He acted as if he had had a
mild stroke.

$fff[At  this  time in the book his friends stopped by and decided he should
go to hospital and drive him there]

$faaThe  doctors  at the hospital examined Monet, and could not come up with
any  explanation  for  what  had happened to his eyes or his face or his
mind.They gave him injections of antibiotics which had no effect.

$fff[The  doctors decided he should to to Nairobi Hospital which is the best
private hospital in East Africa]

$afaHe  could  still  walk, and he seemed able to travel by himself.  He had
money;  he  understood he had to get to Nairobi.  They put him on a taxi
to the airport, and he boarded a Kenya Airways flight.

$faaA  hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour flight
from  every city on earth.  All of the earth's cities are connected by a
web  of  airline  routes.   The web is a network.  Once a virus hits the
net,  it  can  shoot  anywhere  in  a  day - Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los
Angeles,  wherever  planes  fly.  Charles Monet and the life form inside
him had entered the net.

$afaMonet  became  airsick.  He holds a sick bag over his mouth and coughs a
deep  cough and regurgitates something into the bag.  The bag swells up.
Perhaps  he  glances  around, and you see that his lips are smeared with
something  slippery  and red, mixed with black specks, as if he has been
chewing  coffee grounds.  His eyes are the color of rubies, and his face
is  an  expressionless mass of bruises.  The red spots, which a few days
before  had  started  out as starlike speckles, have expanded and merged
into  huge, spontaneous purple shadows:  his whole head is turning black
and  blue.  The muscles of his face droop.  The connective tissue in his
face  is  dissolving,  and  his  face  appears  to hang visibly from the
underlying bone, as if his face is detatching itself from the skull.

$faaHe  opens  his  mouth  and  gasps  into  the  bag, and the vomit goes on
endlessly.   It  will  not  stop,  and he keeps bringing up liquid, long
after  his stomach should have been empty.  The sick bag fills up to the
brim  with  a  substance known as vomito negro, or the black vomit.  The
black  vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors,
black  and  red,  a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial
blood.   It  is  haemorrhage,  and it smells like a slaughterhouse.  The
black vomit is loaded with virus.  It is highly infective, lethally hot,
a  liquid  that  would  scare  the daylights out of a military biohazard
specialist.

$afaWhen  a  hot  virus  multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with
virus particles, from the brain to the skin.  Then, the military experts
say,  the  virus  has  undergone  `extreme  amplification'.  This is not
something  like  the  common cold.  By the time an extreme amplification
peaks  out,  an  eyedropper  of the victim's blood may contain a hundred
million  particles  of  virus.   During this process, the body is partly
transformed into virus particles.  In other words, the host is possessed
by  a life form that is attempting to convert the host into itself.  The
transformation  is  not entirely successful, however, and the end result
is  a  great  deal  of  liquefying  flesh  mixed  with  virus, a kind of
biological  accident.   Extreme  amplification has occured in Monet, and
the sign of it is the black vomit.

$faaHis  blood  is  clotting up - his bloodstream is throwing clots, and the
clots  are  lodging  everywhere.  His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet
and  head are becoming jammed with blood clots.  In effect, he is having
a  stroke throughout his entire body.  He doesn't seem to be fully aware
of  the  pain  anymore  because  the blood clots lodged in his brain are
cutting  off  blood  flow and causing small strokes.  His personality is
being  wiped away by brain damage.  This is called depersonalisation, in
which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish.

$fff[...end...?  Your article just runs off here mate, is that it?  I bloody
hope s because ot made me feel like speaking toGid on the big white
telephone, eeeuuurrrgghhh! - F.ed]

End