Moose

This has nothing to do with a moose.  Nothing at all.  Really.  You should believe me.  Because if you don't....

Ebola.

This is about Ebola virus.

 Ebola really does have absolutely nothing to do with moose, except that moose are lucky bastards who don't get infected with ebola, and neither do caribou, for those that are interested in caribou and such things.

But, aside from making moose and caribou some of the luckiest mammals on earth, lets go over, briefly, what it is that ebola does...

Ebola will kill you.  It's a biosafetly level 4 infectious agent, meaning that you don't handle this stuff without wearing a spacesuit.  Literally, a spacesuit, in a negative pressure chamber, and you get scrubbed down with bleach for a good 7 minutes afterward anyway.  People don't fuck around when handling ebola, seriously, there may be less safety measures in place around nuclear weapons than around scientists working with ebola.  There is a reason for this.

Ebola has had, in past outbreaks, as high as a 90% kill rate, and that's with hospitalization.  To put it in perspective, another biosafety level 4 agent, Yellow Fever, is considered a highly lethal virus, and at best it has a 20% kill rate.  Yes, that makes ebola, or rather, the entire Fillovirus family, roughly 4 times as deadly as any other infectious biological agents on earth and almost as detrimental to civilization as Kanye West's continued existence.  

Now, a 90% kill rate might not be that bad, if it killed you by say, making you enjoy life too much, or by giving you an obsession with eating pancakes; but that's not how ebola rolls.  Ebola starts off rather nicely and politely, like a cousin you don't like much but invited over for tea anyway, by giving you a simple headache, maybe a tiny fever and some nausea; at this point you've probably had worse from Taco Bell or pop radio.  But then it gets  a little rowdy, like a clown you hired for your child's birthday that drank an entire bottle of Mr. Daniels before tearing down all your drapes and pouring kitty litter on the brithday cake, and it starts with the bleeding.  For some clarification, ebola causes hemorrhagic fever, hemorrhaging means that you're bleeding profusely, and I don't mean 'knicked yourself shaving' profusely, i mean 'you're bleeding out of orifices you didn't have 10 minutes ago' profusely.  But this bleeding doesn't start all at once, it starts in the eyes; your eyes will fill with blood and turn red.  And that's just the start of the fun, and by fun, I mean torture, like reading the Twilight series torture.

While you're bleeding, ebola is also dissolving you.  It goes for the connective tissue, in your face; you lose the ability to have facial expression after the first few days.  After that, hair starts falling out, your fingernails fall off, teeth come out, skin starts sloughing off, and it's not just on the outside that you're losing the bits that hold your body together; this is happening in your digestive system as well.  Effectively, it's like when a woman has her period, and the lining of the uterus is sloughed off as menstrual flow, but with your entire digestive system, and it's all vomit and shit and donuts you couldn't digest because you caught ebola.

Oh, and about the bleeding, you're probably wondering why the bleeding doesn't stop.  Ebola actually promotes blood coagulation phenomenally well, so well, that all of your bloods clotting factors are used, and used improperly.  It makes your blood just clot, everywhere, eventually your entire spleen becomes one big blood clot.  But wait, you're not wondering why your blood isn't clotting; because ebola also turns your frontal cortext to goop.  Well, goop isn't a very sciency term, but, well, it fits, because you loose your personality, which is what the frontal lobe of your brain is responsible for, along with other trivial things, like conscious decision making. 

Ok, so, now you're bleeding out your eyes and assorted orifices which you may or may not have had before you caught the 'bola, you have a fever and a headache, you're vomiting black vomit (oh, yeah, your vomit turns black, and it's not an awesome black vomit that could come from drinking excessive amounts of coffee, it's actually kinda nasty lookin), you have no facial expression, your personality and decision making abilitys are gone, and you're dissolving from the inside out.  This all can happen within 10 days, under 7 if the virus is impatient, or if you're just predisposed to being dissolved.

Now, if you're currently not infected with ebola, or at least in the non-dissolving state, you're probably wondering how you catch this little demon particle.  It's simple, you touch it, or inhale it, or drink it, well, drinking it wouldn't work, probably, but if someone gives you a glass of ebola, you take it, pour it on their crotch and run like hell.  Thing is, we don't really know how it's spread; no one wants to work with it (no sane person at least), and when there is an outbreak, people are mostly concerned with not-dying.  There's some evidence that the virus can be airborne, or at least aeresolized; meaning that if you can see someone with ebola, you can probably catch ebola.  And it takes less than a dozen virus particles to cause a lethal infection; in soviet russia, you don't catch ebola, ebola catches you. 

And another fun things about ebola is that we don't even know where it comes from.  It's form somewhere that might in Africa, but maybe not, maybe the Philipines, but maybe not.  It could come from a cave under a mountain, but maybe not.  We don't even really know what carries the virus (meaning an animal that can support the virus's life cycle without a deadly infection, commonly refered to as the virus's vector), it could be fruitbats, mosquitos, anything, really, anything; if you're in africa, and something bites you, looks at you, sneezes near you, or breathes the air on the same side of the equator as you, it could give you ebola.

Oh, and if you think this shit only lives in africa and kills those poor kids you see on those compassion commercials that you've probably long since stopped giving a damn about because you're American and you care more about Justin Beiber hitting puberty than dying kids in Africa, then you're wrong (and you're a bastard coated bastard topped with a bastard sundae and served on bastard coated porcelain plates to bastard children that never get presents from Santa and eaten with forks forged by bastards).  There was an outbreak of ebola in America, and not the outskirts of 'America' that people don't care about like Chicago, or Dallas; this shit went down in Reston Virginia, right by Dulles International Airport.  Now, for those exceptionally thick readers out there, having a highly contagious and lethal virus, like ebola, break out in an airport, and international airport, where it could spread uncontained to the whole word, would be a bad thing; like having the soviets win the Cold War grade bad, possibly even worse than listening to Miley Cirus.  Fortunately, not much came from this outbreak, and not because uncle Sam kicked ebola in it's virus sized testicles, but because we were the luckiest sons of bitches ever to exist on the planet Earth; we got hit by an ebola virus that didn't cause deadly infection in humans, only monkeys.  The odds against this are pretty staggering.  I won't bore you all with the bio details that only interest me.   


Summarily, ebola sucks; it's like a malevolent combination of the chickenpox, herpes, hiv, tetanus, meningitis, c-dif, communism, alcohol poisoining, pure evil, the twilight series, Ke$ha's 'music', Kanye West's people skills, bad drivers, the E.T. video game for the Atari and the BP oil spill, only it's all contained inside your body ready to destroy everything you know and love, but you don't care, because it already erased your personality.

 And you're dissolving.


Ebola could probably take down Chuck Norris.