Ebola and the Inside Man — How Your Cells Get you Sick

Ebola can’t get you sick.

At least, not on its own.

It needs help and gets it from an inside man, present in just about all of your cells.

Unlike a lot of other viruses, Ebola needs help to get inside your cells; it can’t do it on its own. Without its inside man, it would be stuck, trapped in a lysosome and locked out of the cell body. It would be a sitting duck, waiting to be pursued and attacked by an immune cell that could pass by at any second.

Ebola needs help to pop out of your bloodstream and into your cells. It can’t do it alone. That’s what many viruses do. They bind to the tiny molecules on the outside of your cells and then use complicated molecular machinery to fuse with the cell membrane. They integrate themselves right into the wall of the cell. After they do that, there’s only one step left for infection. Injection. These fused viruses inject their genome into your cell. These genes take over the cell’s machinery and force it to copy the virus. That’s right, viruses turn your cells into miniature virus factories. They pump out copies on a huge scale.

Ebola doesn’t quite work like that though. The endgame is the same. Eventually ebola converts your cells into a viral factory and copies itself millions of times. But to get in, ebola needs a lot of help from your cells.

Here’s how they get it.