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" Doctors noticed that the Marburg agent had a strange effect on the brain. “Most of the patients showed a sullen, slightly aggressive, or negativistic behavior,” according to the book. “Two patients [had] a feeling as if they were lying on crumbs.” One patient became psychotic, apparently as a result of brain damage. The patient called Hans O.-V. showed no signs of mental derangement, and his fever cooled, and he seemed to be stabilizing, but then suddenly, without warning, he had an acute fall in blood pressure—he was crashing—and he died. They performed an autopsy on him, and when they opened his skull, they found a massive, fatal hemorrhage at the center of the brain. He had “bled out” into his brain. "
― Richard Preston , The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
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" Small blood clots begin to appear in the bloodstream, and the blood thickens and slows, and the clots begin to stick to the walls of blood vessels. This is known as pavementing, because the clots fit together in a mosaic. The mosaic thickens and throws more clots, and the clots drift through the bloodstream into the small capillaries, where they get stuck. This shuts off the blood supply to various parts of the body, causing dead spots to appear in the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, intestines, testicles, breast tissue (of men as well as women), and all through the skin. "
― Richard Preston , The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
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" Droplets of blood stand out on the eyelids: you may weep blood. The blood runs from your eyes down your cheeks and refuses to coagulate. You may have a hemispherical stroke, in which one whole side of the body is paralyzed, which is invariably fatal in a case of Ebola. Even while the body’s internal organs are becoming plugged with coagulated blood, the blood that streams out of the body cannot clot; it resembles whey being squeezed out of curds. The blood has been stripped of its clotting factors. If you put the runny Ebola blood in a test tube and look at it, you see that the blood is destroyed. Its red cells are broken and dead. The blood looks as if it has been buzzed in an electric blender. Ebola kills a great deal of tissue while the host is still alive. It triggers a creeping, spotty necrosis that spreads through all the internal organs. The liver bulges up and turns yellow, begins to liquefy, and then it cracks apart. The cracks run across the liver and deep inside it, and the liver completely dies and goes putrid. The kidneys become jammed with blood clots and dead cells, and cease functioning. As the kidneys fail, the blood becomes toxic with urine. The spleen turns into a single huge, hard blood clot the size of a baseball. The intestines may fill up completely with blood. The lining of the gut dies and sloughs off into the bowels and is defecated along with large amounts of blood. In men, the testicles bloat up and turn black-and-blue, the semen goes hot with Ebola, and the nipples may bleed. In women, the labia turn blue, livid, and protrusive, and there may be massive vaginal bleeding. The virus is a catastrophe for a pregnant woman: the child is aborted spontaneously and is usually infected with Ebola virus, born with red eyes and a bloody nose. Ebola destroys the brain more thoroughly than does Marburg, and Ebola victims often go into epileptic convulsions during the final stage. "
― Richard Preston , The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
