There, still wearing her space suit, she pulled a chain to start the decontamination, or “decon,” cycle. She rinsed her bloody glove and went into the air lock. Then she felt something clammy inside the heavy glove. Jaax rinsed the glove in Envirochem and took it off, and found monkey blood inside it: the blood had run through the hole and drenched the heavy rubber glove. The glove was covered with Ebola-laden blood.

… One day, Jaax’s noticed a hole in Jaax’s right outer latex glove. Her space suit had triple pairs of gloves. Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Jaax’s job during the Army’s 1980 experiments with Ebola was to dissect and examine monkeys that had died of the virus. That may be one of Ebola’s strategies for success. In monkeys, and perhaps in people, a sort of melting occurs, and the corpse’s connective tissue, skin, and organs, already peppered with dead areas and heated with fever, begin to liquefy, and the slimes and uncoagulated blood that run from the cadaver are saturated with Ebola-virus particles. In severe cases, Ebola kills so much tissue that after death the cadaver rapidly deteriorates. Some have been known to escape from the hospital.ĭisseminating clotting cuts off the blood supply in tissues, causing focal necrosis-dead spots in the liver, spleen, brain, kidneys, and lungs. The personality may change: the human patient becomes sullen, hostile, agitated, or develops acute psychosis. They act as if they were already embalmed, even though they are not yet dead. The classic masklike facial expression appears in all primates infected with Ebola, both monkeys and human beings.

This happens because Ebola damages the brain in some way that isn’t known. The patient looks and sometimes behaves like a zombie. The face becomes fixed and “expressionless,” “masklike,” “ghostlike” (in the words of doctors who have seen it), with wide, deadened, “sunken” eyes. A classic sign of infection by Ebola … is a certain expression that invariably creeps over the patient’s face as the infection progresses.

Preston red zone crisis