Ebola Doesn't Liquefy Your Organs. Here's What Actually Happens.

Ebola does not liquefy your organs either, which everybody thinks is the case from the movie Outbreak. Yeah. So this is another thing about that. The mechanism by which Ebola causes either hemorrhagic disease or gastrointestinal disease or any of these things, it— I think of Ebola now as a disease of barrier function. What it does, these macrophages, because they're immune cells, they have the ability to produce these molecules called cytokines, and they're essentially signaling molecules. They can tell all the cells around them, "Hey, get inflamed because there's a virus here," and that's a normal part of the response to the virus and how you clear an infection. So a controlled inflammatory response is really important, but because Ebola hijacks their host cells, one of the things that it does is it causes them to start dumping these pro-inflammatory cytokines into the bloodstream. So your entire body is effectively in a state state of uncontrolled inflammation. And one of the results of this is that your blood vessels are not keeping liquid in the vessels.