Rare Ebola Outbreak Declared & What We Should Do

Author’s note: [Content gets simplified for better understanding, and the information included in this article may change as things progress.]

An outbreak of Ebola has been declared by the UN World Health Organization (WHO) in Uganda, with a rare strain, the Sudan strain. So what does it mean, and what could we do to prevent it?

It is hard enough with the current ongoing pandemic of Covid-19. However, we should never forget that other diseases and viruses exist. And one of them is Ebola. The latest outbreak in Uganda follows six suspicious deaths so far. Let’s take a deeper look into this virus.

Ebola is a virus, and if you didn’t know, these are submicroscopic infectious agents only replicating inside the living cells of an organism. And unlike viruses like Covid-19, it attacks your body’s defenses directly before spreading to other parts. The complicated defense mechanism of your body is called the immune system, which consists of multiple cells, like the Dendritic Cells, Killer T Cells, and Helper T Cells. The Dendritic Cells are the immune system’s brains that command the lesser levels of the system and tell them how to combat new intruder viruses.

The Ebola virus cleverly and slyly evades this system by directly infecting these cells, with one of its first targets being the Dendritic Cells. The virus stops these cells from sending alert signals to the larger whole of the immune system and even orders other cells to kill themselves, further delaying and weakening the immune system responses. Besides that, the Ebola virus injects its code into the “factory” of hacked cells, and they start producing large amounts of copies of the virus. Even though there are cells such as the Natural Killer Cells that end the lives of the infected cells, they would also get infected and die themselves before finishing the job.

With enough of these copies produced, the Ebola virus destroys the cell membrane and releases armies of itself into the tissue. At the same time, Ebola infects the body’s guard cells and forces these cells to command the cells making up the blood vessels to release fluids into the body, causing internal bleeding. Ebola also starts evading organs like the liver, killing large amounts of liver cells, causing more bleeding, and ultimately organ failure. To make it even worse, all of this is happening simultaneously. Ebola manipulates your immune system, making its defenses battle against you. Paradoxically, the stronger your immune system is, the more damage it could inflict on itself.

So should you worry about the Ebola virus infecting you? Well, you shouldn’t panic too much because Ebola only transmits, as far as we know, through bat bites or exposure to bodily fluids of a person with the disease. All you need to know is that good sanitation, constant hand-washing, and not coming into contact with bats are great precautions in preventing infection. That’s the end of this production from the New News Newsminute. Thank you for reading, and stay safe.