Thank you for tuning back in to the hospital medicine podcast. As we get into part three

regarding Ebola virus disease, there's a pretty cool fact that I think sometimes gets

overlooked when this is talked about, and that is after outbreaks, there are some people who

have antibodies to Ebola that never got sick. And so what that means is there

are plenty of individuals who are actually infected, but they never ever developed symptoms of

Ebola. Immune responses and inflammatory responses can definitely be very different from individual to individual.

And that really is not new information in regards to Ebola.

In fact, there was a study out of the Lancet back in June of 2000,

and the title of that study was,

Human asymptomatic Ebola infection and strong inflammatory response.

The reason I bring this up is other than the individual immune and body reactions to Ebola,

there is a big difference in how patients are treated in different parts of the world.

As a result, there are so many factors that go into whether someone survives or doesn't survive

this infection. And even though I did talk about in the first podcast, very high fatality

rates, particularly in the outbreaks in Africa,

we don't automatically have to assume that that would necessarily be the case in a place

like the United States.

In the October 23rd, 2014 New England Journal of Medicine, there was a Perspectives article, and it was titled,

Doing Today's Work Superbly Well, Treating Ebola with Current Tools. And I love some of the

points that were made in this article. The authors were pointing out that volume depletion and all the

metabolic abnormalities that I talked about

with the labs, these can be treated. Ultimately, what you are really often treating with Ebola

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