Stuff You Should Know - How Ebola Works

Episode Date: August 14, 2014

A disease that was discovered and contained to Central Africa in the 1970s has revived and spread in 2014. Now there is an Ebola outbreak that has moved across borders and science still has no cure for it. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lacher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry in our germ-free sealed off recording booth. In Atlanta. I assume this is isolated. Yeah. I don't think it's a biological safety level four than you.

Would you say maybe three? I don't know. I think we're probably zero. Have you ever been to the CDC? No. They have, you can go into their lobby. There's like a lobby museum, a couple of stories with a lot of interactive exhibits. And you me and I went and she tried on one of those biological safety level four suits.

Oh yeah? I got a very cute picture of her in one. They probably swallowed her up. Yeah. Did they have an extra small? I think it had one size. Yeah, it was just kind of drooping down. But it's a really neat museum.

If you're ever in Atlanta, I strongly recommend going to the CDC. Yeah, I'm going to wait. Well not that I'm paranoid because we'll talk about how you can get Ebola, but it's still a, you know, I'll just, I'll just wait. I don't really blame you. Yeah. I mean, those two patients, there are two patients in Atlanta right now for those of you who have been under a rock lately, right, who are being treated for Ebola apparently

successfully through a, at the time, an unapproved drug or therapy, I should say. And they're at Emory though. They're not at the CDC. Right. The CDC is only dangerous because, you know, they keep anthrax and unlocked refrigerators and that kind of thing. Yeah. And hey, we want to thank Jerry for speeding this one through.

Yeah, thanks. We got a lot of requests to do this obviously because it's timely and we waited a week and there's been some new developments and there will be more in the coming weeks obviously. But we're recording this today and it's coming out on Thursday. And like it's Tuesday. Today's Tuesday. Yeah. Yeah.

So bam, it's dropping. That's right. So there's people in Atlanta with Ebola right now and those people came from Liberia. There are a couple of missionaries and they were flown back to America to be kept in isolation units at Emory. Yeah. With controversy surrounding that move. Well, yeah, because if you're a utilitarian philosopher, that was a monstrously stupid

thing to do. To voluntarily bring Ebola into the United States. Yes. And there's a good chance that you will save the lives of two people, but you also threaten the lives of several hundred million people who may not have ever otherwise been exposed to the virus. Yeah. So I'm not one for like panic and especially not fomenting panic.

Of course not. But just if you understand utilitarian philosophy, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. But we're compassionate humans, not robots. So utilitarian philosophy doesn't usually go over that well. Have you seen Contagion? Yeah. I think we've talked about that on the show. Reading all this stuff really like Soderbergh kind of nailed it.

Yeah, he did. And I believe in that movie it became airborne though, which is. Was it Ebola in the movie? Well, no, I don't think they. Was something similar? Yeah. I don't even think they named it because so they could take a little bit of fictional license.

Yeah. Or maybe they named it, but I don't think it's Ebola. But it, you know, started with a fruit bat and, you know, transferred. We'll get to all that stuff. Yeah. That one scene where Gwyneth Paltrow has that fruit bat on her face and she can't get it off. It's riveted.

Very scary movie though, man. It is. Outbreak was pretty good too. I haven't seen it in many, many years, but I liked it at the time. Yeah. It was all right. It was okay. Not as good as Contagion.

Dustin Hoffman plays an epidemiologist like no other. He's great. Okay. So let's get down to it, man. Let's talk about Ebola. As far as discovery goes, it's a relatively new player on the deadly virus infectious scene. Yeah.

I guess we should go back to 1976. It's actually named for, and I didn't know this, the Evola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which I imagine that river doesn't see a lot of traffic anymore with that name, but it has nothing to do with the fact that they discovered it in the river or anything like that. No. It's just the region. Yeah.

And at the time, that country was known as Zaire. Yes. And even still, there's a strain of Ebola known as Zaire type Ebola, and it's the deadliest of all. Yeah. Each of the five strains are named for the origin country or area. And in this case, a man named Maballo sought treatment for a fever in 1976. They thought it was malaria, which a lot of times they still mistake it for malaria or

other diseases. So they treated him with a shot of quinine and said, this should make you feel better. Let me reuse that needle because of Zaire and we're underfunded, medically speaking. And that, of course, spread. And before you know it, relatives, friends, after performing burial rituals where they have close contact with bodily remains and fluids, people started dropping like flies. Yeah. It's really scary.

And then they think he was patient zero or at the very least, he was an index patient, which is the first... What's the difference? Between an index case... Maybe patient zero is like the first person to ever contract it, and an index person is the first person in an outbreak. Okay. So it's possible that Maballo is both.

He could be patient zero and the index patient for that particular outbreak, but the patient zero for all of Ebola. Yeah. And in this case, in 1976, 91% of the 358 people died. And kind of a simultaneous outbreak happened in Sudan, and 53% of the 284 died in Sudan, which is pretty good because it generally kills about 90%. Okay. So in Sudan type Ebola, it's less deadly than Zaire type Ebola.

By about 40% in that case. Yes. But even still, you're talking 50%, it's way better than 90%, but consider this, Chuck. I look this up. You know the influenza of 1918, 1919? Sure. The Spanish flu, I think is what it's frequently called. Back then, there's something like, I think, 20 million to 40 million people died in one

year across the world. Wow. Okay. The average life expectancy in the U.S. dropped by 10 years that one year because of that one flu. It had a mortality rate of only 2.5%. Wow. Ebola has a mortality rate of 90%.

Well yeah, that's why it's so frightening because if it became airborne or aerosol and widespread, it could eradicate like the planet. Pretty much. Of human being. Absolutely. It's only been shown to be able to spread via aerosol, like through the air, among monkeys. That's kind of cold comfort though, if you think about it. No, totally.

We can get it from monkeys and if monkeys can give it to each other like that, then that's terrible. That's bad stuff. The reason why they think Ebola has not spread as one because you can't catch it through the air, but also kind of chillingly, it kills people too fast for them to infect that many other people. One of the problems, and you've mentioned it in that story about Maballo, patient zero or at least the index patient from 1976, in Central Africa, there are a lot of burial

customs that require, like you said, the family and friends of the deceased to wash the body, sometimes to clean the waste and food out of the body and to not use protection or gloves or anything like that. You know, like contact with the body is key. Right. It's a part of the ritual burial and it still is. Even during this outbreak now, you have like World Health Organization people going from village to village saying, do you have any dead that we can take away to bury?

And they're like, no, no one's died here. And they're literally hiding the bodies because they don't want their deceased to not be honored in the way that they should be based on custom and tradition. The problem is, is this custom and tradition is also simultaneously spreading the Ebola virus. Yeah. I mean, just something like that, if they could just talk them into at least like wearing gloves or something, like any little bit would help.

Yeah. At this point, yeah. So you said there's five types of Ebola. Yeah. I guess we should talk about the Philovirus family because Ebola is a virus and it is a Philovirus, which isn't that different from any kind of virus actually, but it is a worm-like particle that's described as hooked like a shepherd's crook. Or a six or a U.

But you mentioned the five different types and they're named after the region of their origin, the Zaire and Sudan strains that we talked about, the Bundabugyo, the Thai forest, formerly the Cote d'Ivoire. And the Reston type, as in Reston, Virginia, which is, you might think, well, but it's true. Yeah. There was a shipment of crab eater monkeys that came out of the Philippines, which is the origin of the Reston type Ebola virus.

And they were sent to a lab, a testing facility in Reston, Virginia, and a bunch of the monkeys started dying. Actually, two shipments, I think, of monkeys died from this. And in the second shipment, some of the monkeys infected some of the humans and the humans contracted the virus, but nobody showed symptoms. So we found out that the Reston virus humans don't respond to. Yeah. It's not deadly at this point, at least.

Which is great. It is great, but one less deadly Ebola virus is definitely good. Yeah. Seriously. All of the genetic information, though, from Ebola comes from RNA instead of DNA like us humans. And it's really pretty basic compared to us. If we have 3 billion base pairs of DNA, there are only about 19,000 number of RNA in a filovirus,

which is pretty basic. Yeah. And that RNA actually is basically, like with any virus, it's just there to say, here's the instructions to replicate me. And here you go. And the Ebola virus spreads like any other virus where it basically enters a cell. It injects that RNA, which in turn hijacks the processes of the cell and turns it from its regular duties into becoming a replication machine for this virus.

And it turns out all of these different virus particles, virions, I think is what they're called. Those things eventually overwhelm the cell, and if it's an enveloped virus like Ebola, that means that the virus can go in and out of the cell membrane, because it's surrounded by like a fat lipid coating, it can go in and out of the host cell without destroying the host cell. A naked virus goes in, injects its stuff, it takes over the host cell, which makes so many that the host cell just ruptures, and then that's the way that the other viruses

are released. With the Ebola virus, it just basically secretes, in a really gross way, but a cell that's been hijacked secretes new Ebola viruses. Yeah. And a lot of this is still a mystery that we're figuring out, but they do know that it can infect a lot of different types of cells, but mainly attacks the immune system. And then from there, it travels to the lymph nodes and then the spleen and the liver through the bloodstream.

And once it's in those cells, it's going to release a bunch of nasty chemicals. They think it's related to the closest to the measles and the mumps, actually, which all that stuff is helpful in trying to figure out cures. Oh yeah. So they think from what they understand of the Ebola virus now is you contract it through contact with body fluids, and it gets into your mucus membranes or breaks in the skin. And once there, it shows a preference for immune cells. Like it goes after, talk about an aggressive virus.

It goes after the very cells that are meant to destroy it, and it messes with them. Depending on the type of cell, it'll either make their function go haywire, which accounts for a huge immune response, or it will shut down an immune cell's defenses, right? So it makes your immune system go haywire, but also prevents your immune system from mounting a defense, which is why you're in so much trouble if you contract Ebola, because it just goes after your immune system. And then once your immune system is suppressed, it goes after other cells, like epithelial cells or endothelial cells, so like connective tissue cells or neurological cells, cells

that line the interior of your blood vessels, which makes your blood vessels weaken and start to bleed internally, and then, like you said, it goes into your liver and your spleen and just hijacks everything there, ultimately leading to tissue damage and then organ failure. Yeah. That's how you will eventually die is multi-organ failure and shock. And you mentioned the antibodies. That's typically how they test for Ebola now is to looking for the antibody instead of

the virus. But like you mentioned, it may have suppressed the immune system such that they can't even detect it, and the only tests they have are expensive and they're tough to transport, require machinery, so it's not the kind of stuff that they're sending over to West and Central Africa for the most part, sadly. So it makes it, the fact that it's in often very remote locations, that the outbreaks have been kind of contained, I guess, they've been relatively small. I think something like 2,500 people out of 25 outbreaks since 1976?

Yes. I have 3,000 cases and 2,000 deaths. And that's up to the minute, like it includes this current outbreak? Yeah. This was like from three hours ago. So that's, I mean, that's a lot of people, especially if you live in Central or West Africa, but if you're looking at the grand scheme of things, especially for as virulent as this virus is, that's not that many people.

So the fact that it's so contagious that it's hard to get and that it's hard to detect makes it very difficult to work on Ebola, work on a vaccine, work on a treatment for it, that kind of thing. Well, and sadly, like, I know this isn't 100% across the board, but pharmaceutical companies develop drugs that will make them money. They're not in it for curing the world of rare diseases that number in the hundreds or low thousands, and basically it's tough to admit it, but there's not a market for these vaccines, a money market, which is a big failure for humanity.

Yeah. Well, it takes the threatened life of two American missionaries to really get the pharmaceutical industry going, and that's exactly what's happened. All right, well, let's take a break here and then we'll talk about some of the actual symptoms right after this message. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikala, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop? But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology? It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, you're going to know if you have Ebola. Well, actually, you won't know for a little while what's kind of scary, as it may think of something else. But when it enters your body, it's going to kind of just sit there silently for two to twenty-one days, typically about four to ten. And then you're going to start noticing fevers, headache, chill, joints aching.

You're going to be really tired. And then that's when you will likely be misdiagnosed with malaria or something else. Maybe dengue fever, maybe yellow fever, but typically malaria is the one that they go with because the central and West Africa, so it's lousy with malaria anyway. And it looks exactly like malaria. It's after a couple of days of showing symptoms that it starts to become apparent that possibly it's Ebola. And the reason why is because you take a very sudden, very sharp turn for the worse after

the first couple of days of showing the normal flu-like symptoms. Yeah, then you're going to have bloody diarrhea, jaundice, really bad sore throat. You're going to vomit. You're not going to be hungry. And then once you have symptoms for about five days, about 50% of the victims will develop rashes on their shoulders and like chest area. And that's the second stage. There's still yet a third stage.

It's about this time where if you are going to have large amounts of bleeding, this is where it's going to start to happen after several days. Apparently in very aggressive cases of Ebola, like the Zaire type, you can die like in six days after symptoms, which is extraordinarily mind-bogglingly fast for something like this. And thanks to our friends at the movie Outbreak, when people think of Ebola, they think of people like squirting blood out of their eyes. There is typically some sort of internal bleeding with Ebola. It is a hemorrhagic fever after all.

Yeah, about 50% of patients will have this bleeding, mainly in the gastrointestinal tract. But it's not coming out of your eyes or anything like that. But it is a result of the Ebola virus going after those endothelial cells, those cells that make up the structure of the blood vessels, and going after the tissues in the organs and just degrading them basically. It's also a part of your immune response. You can have an over-inflammation as a result too. So all this stuff is adding up to you bleeding internally.

And we should say though, Chuck, you're not going to bleed to death. People who die from Ebola typically die as a result of that internal bleeding may lower their blood pressure, and they'll die from hypotensive shock. Yeah, so what happens is your blood tries to clot thanks to proteins, and there's so much clotting going on, and so many proteins hard at work, it can't keep up essentially. And once the tissue damage starts, those proteins are busy, and your bleeding is uncontrolled at that point. Right.

That's a good result. Speaking of proteins, Ebola makes two types of this one specific protein, a glycoprotein, and one is pretty straightforward. It allows the Ebola to move in and out of a host cell. The second use of the, it's called secreted glycoprotein, SGP, that stuff basically goes out and hushes the immune response. It says, shhh, you be quiet and be still. And it just basically goes and shuts down the antigens, is what they're called, that

come after things like Ebola and kill them. And it basically just ties them, it ties them up and gags them. Wow. I know, isn't that just crazy? Yeah, I mean, it's a nasty, nasty virus. What we know about it right now is, and this is one of the other scariest parts, is that they are still not for sure where Ebola hangs out for the years that it lies dormant in the world.

Because it doesn't go away. If it went away, it wouldn't come back. It just means it's out there somewhere in a reservoir and a host. It is a zoonotic disease, so it occurs naturally in animals, but obviously it's transmitted to humans. And like I said, it doesn't go away. What they have to look for and what they've tested and killed scores of animals doing is to see if an animal can survive the virus.

Because if they can survive the virus, they are a good candidate to be the host. A reservoir. Yeah, exactly. So they've tested all kinds of animals, and what they're pretty sure of, but still not 100% sure of, is that it is the fruit bat. Yeah, it looks a lot like the fruit bat. The reason that they've been having such a hard time finding it is because after the 1976 outbreak, Ebola just went silent until the 90s, until there's another outbreak in

the 90s, which is really suspicious as far as epidemiology is concerned, because that's not supposed to happen. So it made them think that maybe there was some exotic animal or exotic plant or something that was acting as the reservoir. But now they're starting to think more and more that, yeah, it's the common fruit bat. Yeah, because they, fruit bats can have the virus and not get sick, and that is, and they've, you know, fruit bats are in locations where they have the index cases, so it's all pointing toward the old fruit bat.

Yeah, plus you can get, they've shown that Ebola can be transmitted through bat guano, which is bat poop. Which is what happened in contagion. Was it bat poop? Yeah. That's seen where Gwyneth Paltres is eating a bowl of bat poop on a bat. Spoiler alert, I think it was through a bat, through a pig that eventually found its way to a restaurant.

Yeah, yeah. The way that movie unfolds at the end, man, is just chilling. Yeah. So like we said, we know how it's transmitted through first human to animal contact, then the infection, and then through, you know, bodily fluids and secretions. And dirty needles is the biggest culprit though, and depending on how you get it, could affect the outcome. If you have gotten it through a needle, you have 100% chance of dying since 1976.

If you've gotten it other, like through other contact, it can be about 80%, so I guess that's where they come up with the 90% rate. Yeah, I think the 100% rate was for the 1976 outbreak specifically. 100%, yeah, 100% of people who transmitted it via needle in that outbreak died. That is insane. Yeah. And the incubation period is different to three to six days for a patient. If you're stuck with a needle versus five to nine for contact exposure.

Yeah. So Chuck, we're going to talk about how to prevent the spread of Ebola up next and what's going on right now with possible cure. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world came crashing down. The situation doesn't look good, there is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So up until recently, when we had these patients shipped over to America, your only chances of contacting Ebola is if you went over to Central or West Africa, which a lot of people

do. A lot of people live there as well. And they suggest that if you find yourself over there, you not dwell in forests or caves, because that's where the fruit bats are. Well plus you can contract it from gorillas and stuff too. So you shouldn't eat bush meat, shouldn't touch dead gorillas? And touch dead animals, period, try and limit that contact. Yeah, that's probably a good idea.

And of course, if you're over there working as a healthcare worker or if you're just over there working or living, you should avoid any kind of reused needle, because that's your guarantee to get it almost. So we mentioned already the burial practices that are becoming a vector for disease, the spread of Ebola. There's also a couple of other factors that are coming into account. They think that if the fruit bat is the reservoir for Ebola, then the reason that it spread, because it was always just in Central Africa before, now suddenly it's in West Africa,

the March 2014 outbreak started in Guinea, they think that it's because the fruit bats' migration patterns might be shifting because of climate change. So that could be fostering the spread of Ebola. One of the other problems with this is that there's a very widespread lack of trust for the governments of West African countries. And so there's a lot of misunderstanding, misinformation, there's very little trust for the World Health Authorities, there's very little trust for the government. Some of the governments are using it as political tools, and I think Sierra Leone, they call

it Eastbola, because the government empower their main opposition strongholds in the East, so they're blaming the East on Ebola. It's just, there's a lot of stuff going on over there that's not helping with this particular outbreak right now. Yeah, that's really sad. You mentioned about this outbreak started in Guinea, they think they traced it back to patient zero, a two-year-old patient there, it was about eight months ago. They think that this toddler died, she suffered from fever and black stool and vomiting, and

then died on December 6th of last year, even though they don't know how she got it. And then shortly after, her mother died on December 13th, then her three-year-old sister died on December 29th, and then her grandmother died on January 1st. And this is all in the village of, I don't know, probably going to butcher this, but it's Melliondu and Guicadoo. Nice. It's my best effort there. In Guinea?

Yeah, and then that area is really close to the Sierra Leone and Liberia borders, which explains a lot. And then it spread outside their village to people that attended the grandmother's funeral, because of course, again, they had close contact with the body, and then two of those funeral attendees brought that back to their village, then health care workers there and family members got sick, and a health care worker in Guicadoo was suspected to have triggered the spread to three other villages in February of this year. And that just shows, man, again, just like in Contagion, it's just like from person to

person, and all of a sudden, it's in places nowhere close to where it started. And then all of a sudden, it's in places not super far from where it started. Yeah. Did you know that there, did you hear about the health care bots that caught the outbreak before the announcement? No. There's these bots. I can't remember the name of the company that runs them, but they're basically just

their job is to just scan the internet, scan journal articles, scan news. They're probably hitting the deep web, I would guess. And they are looking for any and all mentions of things that have to do with outbreaks. I think health care stuff in general. But nine days before the announcement by the Guinea authorities, these bots caught this outbreak in that area. Nine days. Wow.

It's pretty impressive stuff, and hopefully we'll come in handy further down the road when people learn to trust that. Yeah, but still this one's been the worst yet, and one of the scariest reasons is because it's happening so fast, the common methods we have for dealing with it aren't working quick enough. Well, the common methods we have for dealing with it are as follows. Like you said, there's no way to... Well, there are ways, there's tests that show this is Ebola.

They're tough to get to these areas. So it's mostly shoe leather diagnoses, I guess. And then the other aspect of it is that there's no treatment aside from rehydration. Consider that, Chuck. If you're struck down with Ebola, guess what treatment they give you? IV fluids. Yeah. That's it.

They isolate you and give you IV fluids to try to replenish what you're vomiting out, diarying out, and losing in sweat. Yeah. That's the treatment. Well, it was until about five hours ago. Yeah. Yeah, this... I wish we had some sort of a newswire. Oh, we do.

We do. Jerry knows one. Remember when I went, yeah, and then she had one accompanying, and man, it might not even be out yet. So let's debut it right now, Chuck. This is Fresh Off the Wire via CNN. What they have now are an experimental serum called ZMAP, and it's made by MAP Biopharmaceutical. I'm not sure where they're located.

But there's another one called Kentucky Bioprocessing, which manufactures another version of the drug, and they're the ones who are making this brand new, very experimental drug, and so new, so experimental that this week, the World Health Organization had to get a group of ethicists together to say, should we use this stuff? Because the normal testing process is way, way longer than what they've got time-wise, so can we speed this through? Should we use it? The WHO panel said unanimously, yes, it's ethical.

We've got to do something. I think the UN came on board just a few hours ago as well, and so they treated the two Americans, Dr. Kent Brantley and Nancy Rightbowl. They are recovering, but sadly, Miguel Pajares, the Spanish priest, died this morning, even though he was treated with the ZMAP as well. So it has a two-thirds success rate at this point? So far, but that's the deal with experimental drugs is they don't know if it's going to work or how it's going to work or who it's going to work on.

It's sort of an ethical quandary, because if there's already people saying, well, you've used it on these Americans, why haven't you used it in Liberia? It's sort of a no-win situation this early, because if they had died, and this is from Paul Root Wolp, he's the director for ethics at Emory here in Atlanta, he said, you know, if it had killed both these Americans, people wouldn't be saying anything, but because it worked, they're saying, why isn't it being used in Africa? He said, but if we had taken it to Africa and it killed them, they would have said Americans are experimenting this drug on poor Africans.

Well, the way they've done it then is exactly right. They experimented with Americans and then shipped the rest of it to Liberia. So Liberia has the remaining stock of ZMAP right now. There's no more of it in the U.S. It's all in Liberia. Yeah, they applied for it, and like you said, they've got it all, and they're already out, and it takes a while to make. Well, they figured out some ways to make it even faster. So what ZMAP is, is called a monoclonal antibody treatment therapy.

Basically, they introduced something like Ebola into, in this case, a tobacco plant, and they create antibodies. The plant creates antibodies to the virus, and then they say, okay, these are the antibodies we need for Ebola, let's synthesize them, and they make synthetic antibodies, and they take those synthetic antibodies, the monoclonal antibodies, and they inject them into you, the Ebola patient, and these antibodies go in and mimic your body's immune response, which in turn mounts a real immune response, and then fights off the Ebola virus. And they don't just use it for Ebola, they try this on cancer, on all sorts of other

viruses. Sure. So monoclonal antibody therapy isn't new, but using it against Ebola, the specific one for Ebola is new. And then also, using tobacco plants as the source of the antibodies is fairly new, too, but it makes it so that you can turn it over a lot faster. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah, that is very cool.

But like we said, it's so new, I mean, they've literally just treated these few patients, and one of them died, so the jury is out, and in the coming days, we're going to learn a lot more about ZMAP. So hopefully it'll save Liberia. Yeah, they've, I never knew this either, an outbreak is considered over after there've been 42 days straight, which is double the incubation period without any new cases. So everyone's hoping for that 42-day period very soon. I'm hoping for it.

You got anything else? No. Did we ever mention Marburg virus? No, that is a cousin that is also deadly, right? That's the other, it's the other non Ebola virus in the Philovirus family. Right. It is deadly, but it's extraordinarily rare. It's named after a German town where there's an outbreak in the 60s because of some monkeys

that were shipped for testing. Wow. So I guess that's a disease naming convention here. Is it they, or everywhere? Yeah. Is it they named after where it started? Yeah, Reston, Ebola, Marburg. Yeah.

Is that here? Yeah. There you have it. It's up to the date Ebola info. Yes. I don't have anything else you don't either. No, but you know what? You guys, if you want to follow this, we should follow up in our video series.

You better believe it that you can find on our YouTube channel. We use that. We take you in the studio to kind of follow up on some stories, talk about newsy items or make corrections. And it comes out every Monday. Yeah. And you can go to see that at, I think, is our YouTube channel, Josh and Chuck? Yep.

And we'll follow up on this as things develop. Good thing, Chuck. If you want to learn more about the ins and outs of Ebola, you can type Ebola into the search bar at house-to-forks.com, and since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a guy making a move. Oh, yeah. So Corey Barker wrote us in and says, hey, I just want to thank you guys.

First of all, for all the hard work you do, and also for inspiring me to make a move in my career, my day job involves a completely ridiculous amount of driving. You guys have always been instrumental in keeping me awake. I've had people tell me on and off for years, you should do radio, because Corey's got a great voice. He said I would always kind of scoff and think how impossible that would be, but recently I decided that I would try it out. I invested its indecent studio recording equipment, made a few audition tapes, or I guess digital

files. Yeah. And as of last week, I signed my first audiobook contract. Ta-da. Yeah. Congratulations. Like, I'm going to do this. You can.

Is it that easy? Yeah. Well, I don't know if it's easy. I think you have to have some talent, but I think there's plenty of self-published authors on Amazon who are looking for people to make audiobook versions of their stuff. That's awesome. Well, that's what he did. He said we deserve a lot of credit, since if I didn't listen so much to audio while

driving, I would never have decided to take this plunge. Anyway, I decided I would try to repay a slight amount of what I've received from you guys by creating an ad that you could force all the other stuff podcasts to play. I think this is a good idea. If you like it, use it as much as you want. I surrender all rights. Keep on trucking. You will always have at least one listener, and that is Corey Barker, and he said PS,

I decided to start writing again as well, thanks to you guys, because your episodes have spawned some amazing short story ideas. So Corey, let's go ahead and hear your ad for stuff you should know right now. Enrich your mind, explore new horizons, and learn about the world around you. Stuff you should know, Tuesdays and Thursdays on HowStuffWorks.com. Man, how about that? Thank you, Corey. Good voice.

I don't blame you. We are going to totally oppress the other podcasts with this. Yeah, and I told him to listen out for this, and he wrote back saying, I'll make sure I have an extra pair of underwear to change into for when I get this on the air. Awesome. Which is really gross. Put it into your front shirt pocket. Oh my gosh.

The clean pair, Chuck. Oh, okay. If you want to get all excited like Corey, you can share your excitement with us on Twitter at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at discovery.com, and as always, hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

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