Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

by David Quammen

another aspect of the pathology of Ebola virus disease is a phenomenon called disseminated intravascular coagulation, familiar to the medical community as DIC. It’s also known as consumptive coagulopathy (if that helps you), because it involves consumption of too much of the blood’s coagulating capacity in a misdirected way. Billy Karesh had told me about DIC as we boated down the Mambili River after our gorilla stakeout. Disseminated intravascular coagulation, he explained, is a form of pathological blood sludge, in which the normal clotting factors (coagulation proteins and platelets) are pulled out to form tiny clots along the insides of blood vessels throughout the victim’s body, leaving little or no coagulation capacity to prevent leakage elsewhere. As a result, blood may seep from capillaries into a person’s skin, forming bruiselike purple marks (hematomas); it may dribble from a needle puncture that seems never to heal, or it may leak into the gastrointestinal tract or the urine. Still worse, the mass aggregation of small clots in the vessels may block blood flow to the kidneys or the liver, causing organ failure as often seen with Ebola.