“In our hearts, we’ve been burned.”

A spry woman stands before a large, carpeted hotel conference room, her sturdy, Midwestern voice clipping along without need of a microphone as the room murmurs in agreement. She speaks emphatically, her gaze swaying back and forth over the dozens of participants like a fan forever saying no. “Sometimes we get our clown stuff on and think everybody loves us and everything is great!” She pantomimes a peppy little dance with a big, toothy smile. Abruptly, she drops the act, her grin slumping into a scowl, shoulders following suit. “Wake up, clown.”

The group is small, around two dozen people or so, most of whom are members of the AARP generation, but engaged, keenly focused on her, sitting quietly in their stackable chairs, raising their hands as necessary and nodding along with her message. A few are taking notes. The woman behind me smells strongly of cotton candy and it makes my mouth water in that hot, fast way that happens when you're about to be carsick. It’s 9:00 on a cold March morning, day five of the 31st annual World Clown Association Convention in a suburban Chicago hotel, and Tricia Manuel, better known as Priscilla Mooseburger, is commanding the room.

The branch of clowning represented here is the one with the big shoes and balloon tricks, corporate-event clowning and gospel clowning. There are the caring clowns, who aim to bring joy to the sick, and clowns who take church mission trips to foreign countries. Of this wholesome, whiteface empire, one of the few titans at the top is Priscilla Mooseburger. A former Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus clown and costume designer, the current occupation listed on her LinkedIn profile is “Queen of Clowns” at Priscilla Mooseburger Originals. She’s been running her eponymous clown arts camp since 1994, the website for which invites you to "COME TO MOOSEBURGER YOU’LL FEEL FUNNY."

Our complicated relationship with clowns spans everything from the circus to the sex dungeon, from Saturday morning Bozo to Tim Curry peering up from the storm drain, from Patch Adams to Insane Clown Posse, not to mention the ubiquity of that flame-haired, greasepaint visage, the placidly smiling face of what is surely the 20th-century Ozymandias: Ronald McDonald. Every person I told about my plan to attend the clown convention voiced concern for my well-being.

One woman in particular keeps tripping my peripheries with her floppy bucket hat and the way it shudders limply atop her head. Later, when she removes it, I realize that her orange highlighter locks are not, in fact, a wig, but a hue she coaxed nature into.

This seminar, called “Posing for Pictures and Working with the Media,” is for the most part a simmering rally for strategy and solidarity in the face of the current clown PR crisis. Of course, there’s the usual scary-clown trope to deal with, like the recent separate attempts by filmmakers to drum up some publicity by donning clown garb and standing ominously along roadsides and construction sites, last year in Northampton, U.K., and more recently in Staten Island.

But there’s an additional tension this year: Just weeks prior, the New York Daily News reported that America might be facing a clown shortage. Citing decreased membership rates in the country’s largest trade organizations — Clowns of America International (CAI) and the World Clown Association (WCA) — the article painted clowning as the loser in a war of attrition, but nonetheless steadily committed to the fight. CAI President Glen Kohlberger claimed membership numbers are dropping because “[t]he older clowns are passing away.” Compounding this, the reasoning goes, is that interest in clowning is waning: Kids just aren’t joining up like they used to. But despite making clowns sound like a critically endangered species no one is rushing to save, the article also mentioned the intense competition for clowning jobs with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and higher audience expectations necessitating a higher quality of clown. Higher standards are not the usual by-product of a surfeit of talent.

Mooseburger opens the floor for a listing of scary clowns — a naming of the enemy, so to speak. Voices call out around the room, and I consider joining in when no one says John Wayne Gacy, but think better of it. A man yells sharply, “The Joker from Batman!” and the room buzzes in agreement like a human vuvuzela. But in spite of how grim things look out there, Mooseburger preaches the promotion of positive clowning with corn-fed sensibility.

She mocks the shock jocks who call her for interviews and appearances: “Really?” she spits out with a distasteful laugh, her head bobbing up and down like a lovesick cockatiel. “You’re interested in the art of clowning?” Later, she notes, somewhat menacingly, to never take work as a blood-soaked haunted house clown, implying that no real clown would ever participate in the denigration of such a good and wholesome art form.

Mooseburger calls for volunteers to try couples poses, positioning the tall man behind her, his shoulders back and hands on hips, before — at a suitably chaste distance — she bends over directly in front of him and props herself up with hands on squatting knees. Leaning forward with a big, toothy smile, Mooseburger says, “What used to be OK is not.”

What follows is a series of poses, punctuated by rapid-fire comments about Miley Cyrus and our “corrupt society.” “Don’t think that just because you’re a woman that you get a free pass, not in this society,” she warns, referring to how easy it is to be photographed looking accidentally inappropriate. Periodically, she stops the exercise and bellows, “Both hands showing at aaaaall times!” Then the fire alarm rings.

The space is suddenly too small for all the people rushing out of it. The bottleneck into the stairwell has a faint whiff of Black Friday desperation, and clowns collide with me and my bag as I stagger like a drunkard to keep myself conducive to upright and controlled motion. The stairway is filled with the elderly wearing complicated hobby costumes. I make it out unscathed and the fire alarm turns out to be something minor. In the aftermath, clowns mill about the hall. I watch other hotel guests try not to stare, I try not to stare, employees try not to stare, but everyone is staring.

In one regard, the convention feels like any other: like-minded people who share an interest in something, people who love it in a manner much deeper than your average bystander, who know it in incredible detail. But amid the camaraderie, in the spaces between the cliques, the atmosphere is softly bristled. After the seminar, the conversations taking place among the stragglers return to the shortage. “If the clown shortage is real, I’d be having an easier time gettin’ work!”

In spite of the current backlash, clowns are still more than an easy punch line or sight gag. Floyd Mayweather Jr. — the highest-paid athlete in the world — hired a clown procession to lead him into the ring for his win over Marco Maidana. Juggalos have made clowns a symbol of empowerment. A video of Puddles, a tall, sad clown, singing Lorde has more than 8 million views on YouTube. Julia Louis-Dreyfus had clown sex in a GQ spread. (OK, maybe that was a sight gag.) The interesting thing hidden in the guarded humor of this convention is not some piecemeal insight into why people dislike a comedic figure — it’s why, all of this sentiment to the contrary, the clown persists as a cultural icon, revered or feared. There seems to be a perverse and abiding fascination, if even a morbid one. But why? I mean, you clicked on this, right?

Armando L. Sanchez for BuzzFeed

The hotel lobby is decorated to theme — a nice touch, but conspicuous. The balloon art displayed at the front desk isn’t just festive; it’s a signal to the non-clown guests. The inflated, latex animal serves as a polite catalyst for inquiry, such that a hospitable warning might be offered.

I am not afraid of clowns. But there’s something that happens when you walk into the forgettable bathroom of a hotel lobby and meet a fully made-up clown standing by the sink, reflection staring back at you with the Kubrickian blankness of a greasepaint grimace.

I almost wet my pants.

Media seminar fresh in my head, I choke the gasp in my throat and try to smile. While I am going for “warm and effusive,” I’m sure my face is more a pained amalgamation of terror. I can only hope that she thinks I'm trying to be polite. I’m sure she gets it all the time.

But. There are reasons people can find clowns to be so unsettling. That makeup: white face; huge, red mouth; drawn-on smile; eyebrows that kiss the hairline. “When it's up close, it's the visual equivalent of being screamed at,” explains Jaron Aviv Hollander, the co-founder and artistic director of the Kinetic Arts Center in Oakland. And it’s all the big top’s fault: When a clown is standing in one of three or more rings and playing to a huge crowd, the audience needs to be able to read familiar facial landmarks in order to get the bit.

Hollander, a Cirque du Soleil alum and co-creator of “The Submarine Show,” a two-man mime act that played Edinburgh Fringe Festival, says there’s a very practical reason behind some of our collective clown discomfort. “Stephen King didn’t make that scary,” he says, referring to the traditional makeup worn by Pennywise the Clown in King’s It. “He found something that was scary and wrote about it,” adding that the inherent cognitive dissonance between applied makeup and natural expression adds to the creepiness factor. “The makeup is just a mask, and when you do, like, a big smile or a frown or something, that’s an emotion, and you can see the lie.” He is, however, quick to note that within the proper context, like a circus, the makeup is effective. “There are brilliant clowns who do that, and when they're in [their element], they're not going to be scary.”

The hotel restaurant is filled with clowns eating lunch and tapping listlessly on their phones. I watch passersby pose for pictures with an older gentleman on stilts dressed in full clown regalia. Leaning against the check-in desk, Mr. Stilts serves up a glitter-filled grenade at conformism. By embodying a living, breathing icebreaker, talking to people as they wrap their arms around him for pictures, he’s not so quietly breaking the taboo of how you’re supposed to interact with strangers.

Being at the convention involves a dizzying array of stimuli, seamlessly flip-flopping between nice and creepy. (Hotel guests taking pictures and squealing with glee? Nice. Sad clown sitting alone, smoking in his car in the parking lot? Creepy.) Lisa Hinshaw of Illinois got into clowning when her daughter was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, as a way to reach her and connect emotionally. The same way early Disney characters were designed to emote distillations of human emotions so pure that dialogue was superfluous, clowning, too, is in the business of entertainment that doesn’t need words to first be understood. The clowning helped this woman reach her daughter, and she's been doing it ever since.

One of the vacant conference rooms is a standard bare, carpeted cube, filled with banquet tables and white tablecloths and squat, brown, hotel trash cans, perfectly forgettable, save for a jack-in-the-box costume with a life-size clown dummy spilling over the top, mid-spring. The box is big enough for one adult or several children to hide under, the jack’s face contorted into an open maw of gruesome surprise or delighted sadism. The clown has the empty stare of a corpse, and there’s no way to know if there’s someone inside the box right now, waiting to jump out. It’s clown inception, a clown within a clown, possibly within another clown. I cannot stay in the room with it.

I go downstairs and peek in at the clown camp, which right now appears to be a dozen or so small children playing with circus toys in a room and having the most joyous kind of nondescript fun. But I don’t see many teenagers or evidence of a next generation poised to carry on these traditions from aging professionals; in fact, the seminar on mentoring up-and-comers is mostly focused on teaching tips and theater games.

Like most conventions, this one is highly specific. If clowning were Halloween, the WCA Convention would be a megachurch Halloween-alternative party. And while maybe the church party with caramel popcorn and novelty Bibles might have a hard time filling the place year after year, to many people it’s a cherished tradition and a haven inside a corrupt holiday. Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind that these wholesome circus clowns are just one niche in a universe of clowning that shows no signs of truly disappearing. And it’s not just senior citizens getting their silly on.

It’s the friend of mine who has his toddler in circus arts classes. Or the sportswriter I like so much who went to a prestigious clown school in France. Or my favorite bartender, who used to busk on the street in full clown regalia, playing a child’s piano and sitting on a tiny stool. Or my dear friend of over a decade who only recently told me about his childhood experience with clown camp. Or...me, who played the canine clown role of Blue the dog in a North American tour of Blue’s Clues Live! Ask around, and you’ll probably be surprised by how many clowns you know.

Armando L. Sanchez for BuzzFeed

So, when did the clown emerge in our history? “I don’t know,” Hollander says, laughing. “I think that it goes back to a point when cavemen are sitting around a campfire, making fart jokes.”

He’s not wrong. Across the ages, from court jesters to fools on stage, clowns have used physical comedy to do important work. By acknowledging taboos and doing the wrong thing the right way (like falling in love with an inanimate object) or the right thing the wrong way (fishing in a lobster tank), or by just outright flying past the fuzzy, culturally sanctioned limits of propriety, clowns function as society’s pressure valve.

Aristotle says in Poetics that comedy and satire originated with phallika — ritual clowning in the form of a penis parade. These parades were a common feature of the cult of Dionysus, filled with obscenities, verbal abuse, and, of course, penises.

Photo of dance by kachina dancers of the Hopi pueblo of Shongopavi, Ariz. Photo taken between 1870 and 1900.

Underwood & Underwood Publishers

Ritual clowns in the Zuni tribe cure illness through dance, speaking truth to power with sharp-edged paradoxes of current events. They also eat things like urine, feces, pebbles, and ash to prove the superiority of their own stomachs. (And, I imagine, to provide an emetic for those in need.)

Americans tend to think primarily of circus clowns and children’s entertainment. Greasepaint, red nose, giant shoes, loud wig, that sort of thing. But clowning as an art form is — and for a long time has been — a way that humans turn our fears and inadequacies into the foundation of community and intimacy. It’s hard not to feel like we’ve lost something weird and wonderful by making clowns into scary, carnivalesque villains.

“The clown perhaps is this important figure that allows us to see ourselves in our naked, humiliating glory and to be able to laugh at ourselves,” says Quinn Bauriedel, co-founder and co-artistic director of the Obie Award-winning Pig Iron Theatre and director of the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training. “The clown is kind of helping us admit to ourselves that we are fundamentally stupid and perhaps poetically stupid,” adding that he uses that word to mean “something wonderful, not something horrible.”

“When someone trips and falls, we look and we laugh because secretly we're like, I'm glad that person tripped and fell and it wasn't me.” He confesses that he fell down yesterday, and that yes, someone laughed at him.

Which is, of course, the beauty of the clown. “This little red nose helps us to seek out our own idiosyncrasies and neuroses and foibles and begin to share those in public so that other people can laugh at them, form community, and realize that, in some fundamental ways, we all fail.”

Armando L. Sanchez for BuzzFeed

Universal Pictures

This is not a eulogy. This is not a neatly smug explanation for why we should have seen this coming. I will not be digging blindly into a dead man’s head, nor will I perform a full transnasal craniotomy with a long, slender hook. I know him only as a clown, a man with the rare gift of telling the uncensored truth while making its existence bearable. This is not a think piece on the cultural importance of Dead Poets Society or the labor practices in Hook. It’s not a list of his 13 funniest moments, a sallow retrospective on his darker roles, a reprinted interview from decades past, copious arm-hair fetish erotica, or a callous analysis of the physical aspects of his suicide. No, this is fumbling through the sick sense of recognition.

When the news broke of Robin Williams' death, I’d just settled into a faded lime settee, my sweaty August thighs adding to the body fluids no doubt collected on the velvet upholstery. The hot dredges of summer daylight, the kind already slipping through our proverbial fingers, poured unencumbered through a wide window that seemed to pluck the fading light right out of the clouds. It was the second half of a long workday, the part where I crawl into my favorite bar and sit in the corner like a sullen cat and make strange, grimacing faces while banging away at a keyboard. I opened my laptop and I saw it: Robin Williams, apparent suicide. And I believed it immediately.

For most of this calendar year, I’ve been researching clowns. Talking to clowns, reading about clowns, spending time around clowns, and generally amassing a book’s worth of clown trivia. (For instance, Hugh Jackman used to be a birthday party clown.) And while there was certain levity at times, I was struck by how much sadness was seeping through cracks everywhere I looked. There’s the tragedy of Joseph Grimaldi, the progenitor of the iconic clown whiteface and one of the biggest entertainers of his day, who lost his first wife and baby during childbirth, watched his son die an alcoholic, tried to commit suicide and failed, and died a broken, penniless drunk. There’s Barry Lubin, better known as Grandma the Clown, who regaled me with his history of alcoholism, depression, cancer, divorce, and loss. Heartfelt stories came pouring out of strangers and friends alike, all signaling to me that the sad clown isn’t just an archetype; it’s part of what makes them great. Something about life in the darkness makes one cherish those moments in the light.

At first, it seems a great cosmic irony that Williams dedicated his life to inspiring the kind of joy and release he could never really give himself. But I get it. And, of course, he did.

For me, a lifetime of depression has meant that I grew up feeling like the awkward assemblage of my own biological chaos was woefully inadequate, like a pebble in someone’s shoe, some tiny, insignificant nuisance to be found, removed, and absolved. People assured me that it gets better, to just keep trying, to do something nice for myself, to find joy in daily life. They can fix you, they said. You don’t have to be like this. Let me tell you how to fix this. We need to fix you.

It always seemed like bullshit. How does one start to climb out of a cave that seems completely air-tight?

Whereas other brains might feature a home built with treated lumber, finished with something shiny and easy to clean, I’m more of a pile of raw wood. It’s a little too much empathy, perhaps, or maybe just not enough serotonin floating around upstairs. But whatever the cause, I saw myself in Robin Williams. I learned there was power in laughing at your demons, and the sweetest glimpses of amelioration in unleashing laughter in others. A master of the art of clowning — that is, mocking those in power with impunity and relieving the quiet anxieties of social taboos — Williams was the consummate performer. And, like so many other great clowns, it seems his appreciation of joy must have, in some way, been borne out of excruciating pain.

I think there’s such beauty in the clown. I don’t mean this with any schmaltzy pretense; I mean it in the same way one is the lowest common denominator of all whole numbers. Like how farts can make even babies giggle. The way it’s hard not to laugh when someone falls down. The way it feels so, so good to make someone smile.

The way it can reach people who think themselves unreachable.

Imagine you have a house full of appliances, but you’ve never had electricity and have no idea that other people do. And then one day, the power just fucking turns on, and everything whirs to life, and suddenly the darkness is not only kept at bay. That’s what it felt like when I finally got on the right medication a few months ago. This was soon followed by a churning horror I’ve yet to shake that settled into my guts when I finally realized how sick I’d been. Depression can also be like a house full of cat piss: After a while, you just get used to it.

When Williams died, I suddenly felt reconnected to my years of loneliness in a way I couldn’t experience before treatment. I still cannot shake how deeply isolated I felt when in the depths of my illness, how I felt rejected by many of the people trying to help me. Which is why, in huge, choking sobs, in the middle of an empty bar, I erupted into grief for Robin Williams, knowing full well that I’m only here because my suicide attempts were unsuccessful, and so I got to stick around for another go at treatment. But in those tears was also an outpouring of gratitude: He taught me that I might be fucked up, but so was he, and weren’t we all, anyway?

I believe that one of the kindest things you can say to a person is simply this: You’re fucked up, and that’s OK. And that’s what I heard in him. He seemed as fearless as he did troubled, and the way he spoke candidly about everything from cunnilingus tongue fatigue to harrowing mental illness made me feel like maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t so bad to be stuck inside this brain of mine. That life is generally ridiculous and messy, and we are all so deeply screwed up, and, given the choice of laughter or tears, your best bet is to dance on the edge and revel in the absurd intimacy of the two.

Robin Williams walked that razor edge between laughing and crying, gathering up the mishmash of our poetically stupid humanity and reflecting it back to us with such compassion that we saw not the tally of our insufficiencies, but the glorious sum of our parts. A consummate reminder that everything is ridiculous, we are never as alone as we think we are.

We’re all fucked up, and that’s OK.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Without proven treatments or vaccines, our arsenal in the fight against Ebola consists of contact-tracing, decontamination, and prevention. Sealing off access to human bodies is our only battle-tested weapon, because you can’t get Ebola if you don’t touch Ebola.

For health care and burial workers in the “splash zone” — the area in which a person can get splashed with bodily fluids — recommended personal protective equipment (PPE) looks like a cartoon space suit. But aesthetics be damned; this level of protection seals out the wet danger of a hot zone with layer upon layer of waterproof materials. It’s the garb of choice for situations that slosh.

However, Ebola is not so easily transmitted via casual contact. Earlier this summer, Craig Manning, a spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said that if he had a choice between being in a room with an Ebola patient or an influenza patient, he’d pick Ebola. His reasoning was that one can stay out of the splash zone, but it’s hard to avoid breathing in shared air. As such, workers who aren’t expected to encounter large quantities of infectious fluids wear streamlined PPE. And, with a little practice and attention to detail, it’s actually not that hard to do.

For example, when a flight from Newark had to be decontaminated after a passenger exhibited Ebola-like symptoms, the CDC guidelines for PPE were as follows: waterproof gloves (double-gloving recommended if cleaning large amounts of bodily fluids); surgical mask; eye goggles or a face shield; long-sleeved, waterproof gown; and rubber boots or shoe covers if there could be splashing. The goal is to protect all skin and mucous membranes from the cleaning chemicals in use, some of which could be hot with Ebola. This basic protective ensemble is also the minimum PPE recommended for hospital custodial and service personnel who are working outside the splash zone but in the vicinity of infected patients.

As important as the gear itself is the order in which you put it on and take it off. One must be vigilant to avoid the PPE version of panties-before-garter-belt, because sequence can literally make the difference between life and death.

Recently, the protocol has changed. Previously, the CDC’s general PPE poster said that goggles should be removed before the gown, but the CDC now recommends the gown come off prior to the goggles. The change gives more protection to the highly vulnerable eyes, nose, and mouth.

In addition, the CDC just added recommendations to wear a protective hood to cover the neck as well as fluid-resistant leg and feet coverings. These new recommendations appear to be aimed at people working in the splash zone and not those who are merely working nearby — although when asked directly on Thursday, the CDC did not say whether its new PPE guidelines applied to all PPE or just the type worn in the splash zone. An agency spokesperson said the CDC is reviewing its guidelines.

We will update this post as we learn more, but here are instructions on general — not splash-zone — PPE that were reviewed by the CDC on October 13.

Before you get started, please make sure that you have designated a safe place for PPE removal, a place for biohazardous waste collection, and a designated buddy to check your protective garb for loose ties or holes or other unseen calamities. It probably goes without saying that it should be someone you trust. Or you can just use a mirror.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Now, go ahead and put on a pair of inner gloves, which we’re going to treat like your skin. These are your new bare hands; do not get them contaminated and do not be lulled into false complacency by their presence. They will remain on until the very end. Accept this as your new normal, and seriously, stop touching your face.

Ready? OK.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Step one is to put on the waterproof gown in the backward-bathrobe style of those glorified napkins they give patients to wear in the hospital. Make sure the gown covers from the neck to the knees, reaches all the way down to the wrists, and wraps around to tie securely in the back at the neck and waist. Do not, in your zeal for protection, tie impossible knots. You are going to have to untie these later. Remember that.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Next up is the surgical mask. Place it on your face and tie it securely around the back of your head and at the top of the neck. Then — and this is important — bend that little metal bit at the top edge of the mask to fit your nose. This is not something you can do later, as touching your face with contaminated hands defeats the entire purpose of suiting up. Make sure the mask covers you from up on the nose to below the chin and that it fits close to the face. Hope you brushed your teeth.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Once the mask is secured, pop those goggles on and adjust everything for a snug, perfect fit. Then check everything and adjust again. Make sure you haven’t screwed up your mask and then do another full recheck. Repeat as necessary. There will be no goggle-adjusting later, for obvious reasons. (Alternate option: Wear one of those “human windshield” face visors.)

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Last step is the gloves, which should be pulled up over the cuff of the gown. Be sure to tuck your sleeves into your gloves, and snugly. Sometimes people wear two pairs of gloves for additional protection — and easy replacement. Gloves must be replaced if they become too soiled, so double-bagging it means you can change them without untucking your sleeves and exposing yourself.

And you’re finished!

When wearing PPE, try to touch as few surfaces as possible and don’t mess with your gear. Fussing with things like ties, elastics, and fit at this point is verboten — you are going to have to touch some of those ties later, OK? They are precious and must remain pure.

Now comes the fun part. After baking in your protective cocoon, you get to peel that thing off. How you do this makes all the difference to successful PPE. Just like a great striptease, removing PPE is a deliberate act full of purpose, not a haphazard, utilitarian flailing. (It’s like the game The Floor Is Lava, but the outside of your PPE is the lava, and instead of lava, it’s Ebola.)

The first thing to go are the gloves. Do not — DO NOT — hook your finger inside the glove for removal. The way you would normally remove a glove — by sticking your fingers inside and pulling — would contaminate your “bare skin” glove. Instead, after a good rinse with some alcohol, pinch the outside of the glove with the opposite, still gloved hand, and then peel it off gently, letting it turn inside out during the process. You’ll wind up with a little wad of inside-out glove in the fingertips of your still-gloved hand; palm it and grip the shit out of it.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

For the other hand, do not — DO NOT — do what you just did to the first glove and pinch the outside of it. You might want to because it’s how you took the first glove off, but your free hand is now inner-glove only. That means you can slip your finger into the clean interior of the remaining glove, hook it from the inside, and peel it off around the balled-up remains of its mate, creating a neat little dirty — and possibly biohazardous — glove bundle. Throw it away in the safe place you designated for biohazardous waste disposal.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

To remove the gown safely, you must do so without touching the outside of it. Undo the ties in the back, and then, with your bare hands, reach down the front at the neck and push it away from your body from the inside; keep going until you turn the gown inside out, then fold it so the nasty is on the inside and roll it into a bundle for disposal, safe-side out. You can practice this technique with a Snuggie or other vaguely embarrassing blanket with arms.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Now you can remove your goggles. Use your bare hands to touch only the strap on the back of your head. Do not touch the front of the goggles with your naked fingers. Gingerly drop that shit in the reprocessing bucket or the special trash. You’re almost free.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Next, you can take that disgusting mask off and feel something other than mouth breathing on your face. Untie the straps, touch nothing else, and gingerly remove it away from the body. Your chin will rejoice, finally free from the sauna of your stale, wet air.

Remove those inner gloves and you are fully doffed! Now wash your hands with alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

One last word of caution, though: Always be aware of your surroundings when dressing.

"I was in this cave in Uganda when bats were being captured for a necropsy,” said the CDC’s Manning, who often assists researchers in the field. He was helping trap and test bats to search for signs of Marburg virus, a lethal cousin of Ebola, and he was suited up to avoid exposure. “I mean, you've been in bat caves; they're just nasty places. They're slippery, they're dark, and you're easily off-balance. At a certain point, I had this searing, burning, stinging pain from the left corner of my left eye, under my face shield, while inside the cave.” He stayed calm but thought, Oh wow, things are going south really fast.

“I had this huge, huge desire to just take my gloved hand and reach it under the face shield and start rubbing the corner of my eye to figure out what might be in there flailing around,” he said via phone from his office in Atlanta. “But, of course, that’s a bad idea.”

Manning also realized that, in addition to the searing pain, the protective barrier of his Tyvek suit wasn’t quite so safe anymore. “The integrity of that barrier had kind of evaporated. I thought to myself, This can't be good.” So he carefully left the cave, and that’s when he put the clues together.

“I noticed that there were some red ants near to where I had been suiting up that morning. What I think might have happened is that the ant landed somehow on my skin and I went into the cave, didn't know it was there because it was so hot and smelly. By the time it'd found an area of mucosa by my eye, it started to bite, and that's what I was experiencing as a searing pain.”

Manning said, “Everybody on the team could tell you stories like that.” And with that, he burst into laughter.

buzzfeed.com

Ebola has been winning this from the start. Since the outbreak began in March, the grim reality of the virus’s march through West Africa and beyond has been laid out in a growing string of data points, the graph showing the number of cases swooping upward in that telltale pattern of exponential growth. The outbreak broke 10,000 cases right around the time the World Health Organization warned of a future with 10,000 cases a week. This isn’t just a fight; this is a war. Which is why, if we are going to beat Ebola, we are going to need an army.

But not the 4,000 troops President Obama recently made available to be sent to countries ravaged by the epidemic. To outsmart the virus, we must raise an army to fight Ebola where it counts the most: inside the body.

Treatment saves those already infected, but vaccines stop the spread of the virus. Treat Ebola and you may save the patient, but not before the virus has ample opportunity to jump to a caretaker or neighbor or someone else. The only way to end the war is to stop infections from happening in the first place.

Period.

There are at least two promising vaccines in the pipeline. These vaccines will need to train the elegant and maddeningly complicated defense systems of the human body to find and destroy Ebola virons before they can get a hold inside the body.

Your body, in all of its warm, wet, and dark wonder, makes a great home for many organisms looking to get out of the cold, bright, dry world around them. Life arose from the ocean, and we carry a reminder of that precious, ancient home inside our skin as we move about through our desiccant world on land; naturally, we’re an appealing place to try to break into.

This isn’t always terrible. We form alliances with many microorganisms — such as the beneficial gut microbes we rely on for digestion. But not all guests are so well behaved. Some of them act like squatters who occasionally deface property; others slip in and set fire to everything in their sights. And your immune system must be able to remember the faces of all the inimical intruders.

Determining friend or foe sounds deceptively simple until you consider not only the diversity of cell types and tissues in the human body, but also the multitude of bacteria, fungi, and viruses a body must successfully identify and chose whether or not to fight. Which would explain how the immune system came to be a sprawling and highly coordinated biochemical military-industrial conglomerate, second only to the nervous system in terms of complexity.

And, perhaps even more incredibly, with inoculations we learned that we could send our immune systems pages of biological cables with detailed instructions on training troops to meet the threats yet unseen. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your own private infantry.

Your defenses break down into two categories: innate and acquired. Innate immunity is the stuff you’re born with, such as skin, mucus for trapping things, stomach acid to ward off food poisoning, and a cough reflex to eject those that would enjoy the kush digs of your delicate lungs. (Your innate immunity also includes types of white blood cells that attack certain very common invaders.)

On the other hand, acquired immunity is built and trained from scratch. How does it learn? From exposure to antigens, a catchall term for anything that can provoke an immune response, be it biological or not, including things such as pieces of viruses and bacteria, toxins, drugs, even a splinter in your finger. Over the course of your lifetime, your acquired immune system will learn to recognize millions of threats and develop ways to deal with all of them.

That your acquired immune system can only fight what it has been specifically trained to recognize honestly sounds fucking insane: The cells and proteins tasked with protecting your fragile meat sack have to learn to fight each new invader. From the ground up. This is how it happens.

Say you’re chewing your nail on the bus. It’s probably fine because most of the crap under your fingernails is stuff you’ve encountered before. But maybe today, you decide to go in for some cuticle, nibbling off just enough skin to create a shallow, irritating wound on the side of your finger, laying out a welcome mat for the bacteria ever hopeful for a trip inside. The breach in your flesh-based hazmat suit sounds an alarm, calling all manner of soldiers to the location to begin the process of defense and repair, furiously working amid a cacophony of chemical signalling to destroy the foreign invaders. There’s a problem, and the immune system is on it. (One only needs to look how quickly bacteria riot through the body after death to get a sense of just how busy the immune system is, 24/7.)

This isn’t to imply that the relationship between you and your immune system is a friendly one, however. In fact, the tenuous peace between the two of you is known as “self-tolerance.” Given the opportunity, your immune system will happily and swiftly turn on you, as anyone with an autoimmune disorder can attest. In fact, the only reason your immune system isn’t carpet bombing you right now is because the outside of your cells have proteins on them that the patrolling troops recognize as part of the same team: self, not other.

When the infantry arrives at the site of the wound, they get right to work, identifying non-self materials and looking for familiar antigens. For all the antigens you’ve encountered, your body keeps a few copies of the cells, called B cells, that can recognize them; when one of these cells sees an old foe, it slaps an antibody on it like a condemned sign, sealing its fate and marking it for destruction. It also initiates a process to ramp up a full army of other cells that can fight that one antigen.

But say there’s something new in your cut. Something that slips by the initial defenses, a bacteria or virus that your immune system has never before encountered. Your immune system will send specialized cells to find and eat these strangers, breaking them down and shoving the foreign antigens onto their own cell surfaces like big, neon “kill me” signs. This sends out the call to killer T cells, which find the marked cells and destroy them.

Meanwhile, helper T cells show up and start sending dispatches near and far, calling B cells to the area to ramp up antibody production, as well as more killer T cells and cells equipped to deal with the wreckage and subsequent garbage disposal.

However, there is one downside to this elegant solution: You have to get the disease and win the battle before your body will have the information it needs to beat it again. That’s no problem with the common cold. But it’s a big problem with Ebola, which is currently killing half of its victims.

With vaccines, however, we’ve figured out how to train our immunological militias to fight dangers yet unseen. A jab with a needle and we can load in a warning that says, “This is the enemy. Learn to fight it. Remain vigilant.” And in the race to halt the epidemic burning through West Africa, vaccine researchers are working to present Ebola’s dirty T-shirt to the bloodhounds patrolling your streams. One good whiff and they’ll recognize Ebola the way sharks always know when there’s blood in the water.

Traditionally, vaccines have been made one of two ways: killed or weakened. A killed virus, like Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, teaches the immune system to fight by using the corpses of dead viruses. A weakened, or “attenuated,” virus does the same, but with a version of the virus that is unable to infect the host. The former is a punching bag, the latter a gentle sparring partner.

The Ebola vaccines currently being tested are a newer breed, relying on cut-and-paste molecular biology to clip precise snippets of Ebola genetic material and plunk them into an entirely different — and harmless — virus. It’s the immunological equivalent of a lamb in wolf’s clothing, teaching the body to fight Ebola by creating a safe version that looks like the real thing.

The first vaccine is GlaxoSmithKline’s cAd3-EBO Z, which rolled out its phase one clinical trial last month. (A phase one trial doesn’t try to determine if the vaccine works. Rather, it tests whether the vaccine is safe and whether it provokes a robust immune response.) This vaccine is being developed in collaboration with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The second, which healthy volunteers began testing this month in a phase one trial, is rVSV-ZEBOV. Developed by Public Health Agency of Canada, it’s been licensed by the American company NewLink Genetics.

How these vaccines are built reads like bizarro science fiction. The Glaxo vaccine pops a little segment of harmless Ebola code into a virus that gives chimpanzees the sniffles, while its Canadian cousin sews a stretch of Ebola’s genetic material into a virus that makes cows break out in skin ulcers.

For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to call them Chimp Sniffles and Cow Blister, respectively.

Cow Blister (rVSV-ZEBOV) started out as a vesicular stomatitis virus, VSV. A member of the Rhabdoviridae family – which also includes rabies and the lesser-known lettuce necrotic yellows virus – this virus infects livestock: cattle, horses, pigs.

When animals get sick with VSV, they look like Seabiscuit with nightmare herpes, their lips and cheeks blooming with fluid-filled mucosal vesicles and raw ulcerations. Infections in humans are very rare and have been reported in cases of direct exposure such as a lab accident and contact with infected animals; thankfully, in people it is also much less aesthetically confrontational, resulting in a mild flu-like illness, if symptoms even bother to show up at all.

One of the proteins encoded in VSV’s genome is its envelope, a sheath that covers all the other proteins of the virus. VSV’s envelope is what allows the virus to break into the cell by mimicking the secret biochemical handshake of a more welcome protein. And, lucky for us, it turns out that the VSV envelope is also what causes disease.

What happens from here is your basic Mr. Potato Head. Researchers chunk out the envelope gene from their Cow Blister virus, which simultaneously weakens it and removes the virus’s genetic blueprints for causing harm. The warm spot left by the now-gone VSV envelope gene is then reclaimed by that of an Ebola envelope gene. The technical term for such swappery is recombination. Cow Blister is a live, attenuated recombinant, vesicular stomatitis virus-cum-vaccine vector, which is a really precise way of saying it’s something harmless dressed up in an Ebola costume. Teach the guards to recognize the costume so when the real deal shows up, everybody already knows who they are, preventing the Ebola virus from slipping under the immunogenic radar, as is its modus operandi. And no: You cannot get Ebola from this vaccine any more than you can fill your stomach with the aroma of food cooking.

GSK’s “Chimp Sniffles” (cAd3-EBO Z) does the same thing with a different virus, an chimp adenovirus, which causes the common cold in our primate cousins. Originally, researchers were super hot for adenoviruses as a potential vectors for gene therapy. Today, they have been comprehensively studied, so researchers are able to precisely customize these viruses — with minimal surprises.

The Chimp Sniffles vaccine was built to trick the immune system into thinking it is fighting Ebola by splicing benign bits of it into the chimpanzee-derived adenovirus — a cold virus. This recombination of genetic material is the same cut-and-paste as in the previously discussed vaccine — the envelope of the adenovirus is removed and replaced by the Ebola envelope. When this amalgamated virus is introduced to the body, it hops right on existing cellular machinery and starts pumping out the harmless Ebola protein it’s been designed to express.

Once the body notices the Ebola envelope protein, it starts churning out specialized patrol guards, training them to recognize the new and hostile contortions of amino acids. That way, if a person ever meets the real Ebola virus, their immune system will be ready to fight it off.

So far, the vaccine has only been tested in humans to see if it’s safe, not if it works. But in monkeys, both vaccines have been shown to protect the animals from an injection of Ebola.

Moreover, the Cow Blister vaccine has also shown promise in monkeys as a treatment after they had already contracted Ebola.

However, according documents obtained by ScienceInsider from an Oct. 23 meeting at the World Health Organization, even the best case scenario for vaccine deployment in the field is months away. Currently, Glaxo’s vaccine is the furthest along in development; the preliminary data from its phase 1 trial should be ready for analysis by November. If the results are promising, efficacy trials could begin in January. Glaxo also outlined how production could be scaled up during the trial period, so that the vaccine could be ready for wider distribution by April 2015. That is an extremely fast track for a vaccine — the process usually takes years — and it assumes that all goes perfectly with the trials.

This is Ebola. Learn to fight it. Remain vigilant.

“In our hearts, we’ve been burned.”

A spry woman stands before a large, carpeted hotel conference room, her sturdy, Midwestern voice clipping along without need of a microphone as the room murmurs in agreement. She speaks emphatically, her gaze swaying back and forth over the dozens of participants like a fan forever saying no. “Sometimes we get our clown stuff on and think everybody loves us and everything is great!” She pantomimes a peppy little dance with a big, toothy smile. Abruptly, she drops the act, her grin slumping into a scowl, shoulders following suit. “Wake up, clown.”

The group is small, around two dozen people or so, most of whom are members of the AARP generation, but engaged, keenly focused on her, sitting quietly in their stackable chairs, raising their hands as necessary and nodding along with her message. A few are taking notes. The woman behind me smells strongly of cotton candy and it makes my mouth water in that hot, fast way that happens when you're about to be carsick. It’s 9:00 on a cold March morning, day five of the 31st annual World Clown Association Convention in a suburban Chicago hotel, and Tricia Manuel, better known as Priscilla Mooseburger, is commanding the room.

The branch of clowning represented here is the one with the big shoes and balloon tricks, corporate-event clowning and gospel clowning. There are the caring clowns, who aim to bring joy to the sick, and clowns who take church mission trips to foreign countries. Of this wholesome, whiteface empire, one of the few titans at the top is Priscilla Mooseburger. A former Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus clown and costume designer, the current occupation listed on her LinkedIn profile is “Queen of Clowns” at Priscilla Mooseburger Originals. She’s been running her eponymous clown arts camp since 1994, the website for which invites you to "COME TO MOOSEBURGER YOU’LL FEEL FUNNY."

Our complicated relationship with clowns spans everything from the circus to the sex dungeon, from Saturday morning Bozo to Tim Curry peering up from the storm drain, from Patch Adams to Insane Clown Posse, not to mention the ubiquity of that flame-haired, greasepaint visage, the placidly smiling face of what is surely the 20th-century Ozymandias: Ronald McDonald. Every person I told about my plan to attend the clown convention voiced concern for my well-being.

One woman in particular keeps tripping my peripheries with her floppy bucket hat and the way it shudders limply atop her head. Later, when she removes it, I realize that her orange highlighter locks are not, in fact, a wig, but a hue she coaxed nature into.

This seminar, called “Posing for Pictures and Working with the Media,” is for the most part a simmering rally for strategy and solidarity in the face of the current clown PR crisis. Of course, there’s the usual scary-clown trope to deal with, like the recent separate attempts by filmmakers to drum up some publicity by donning clown garb and standing ominously along roadsides and construction sites, last year in Northampton, U.K., and more recently in Staten Island.

But there’s an additional tension this year: Just weeks prior, the New York Daily News reported that America might be facing a clown shortage. Citing decreased membership rates in the country’s largest trade organizations — Clowns of America International (CAI) and the World Clown Association (WCA) — the article painted clowning as the loser in a war of attrition, but nonetheless steadily committed to the fight. CAI President Glen Kohlberger claimed membership numbers are dropping because “[t]he older clowns are passing away.” Compounding this, the reasoning goes, is that interest in clowning is waning: Kids just aren’t joining up like they used to. But despite making clowns sound like a critically endangered species no one is rushing to save, the article also mentioned the intense competition for clowning jobs with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and higher audience expectations necessitating a higher quality of clown. Higher standards are not the usual by-product of a surfeit of talent.

Mooseburger opens the floor for a listing of scary clowns — a naming of the enemy, so to speak. Voices call out around the room, and I consider joining in when no one says John Wayne Gacy, but think better of it. A man yells sharply, “The Joker from Batman!” and the room buzzes in agreement like a human vuvuzela. But in spite of how grim things look out there, Mooseburger preaches the promotion of positive clowning with corn-fed sensibility.

She mocks the shock jocks who call her for interviews and appearances: “Really?” she spits out with a distasteful laugh, her head bobbing up and down like a lovesick cockatiel. “You’re interested in the art of clowning?” Later, she notes, somewhat menacingly, to never take work as a blood-soaked haunted house clown, implying that no real clown would ever participate in the denigration of such a good and wholesome art form.

Mooseburger calls for volunteers to try couples poses, positioning the tall man behind her, his shoulders back and hands on hips, before — at a suitably chaste distance — she bends over directly in front of him and props herself up with hands on squatting knees. Leaning forward with a big, toothy smile, Mooseburger says, “What used to be OK is not.”

What follows is a series of poses, punctuated by rapid-fire comments about Miley Cyrus and our “corrupt society.” “Don’t think that just because you’re a woman that you get a free pass, not in this society,” she warns, referring to how easy it is to be photographed looking accidentally inappropriate. Periodically, she stops the exercise and bellows, “Both hands showing at aaaaall times!” Then the fire alarm rings.

The space is suddenly too small for all the people rushing out of it. The bottleneck into the stairwell has a faint whiff of Black Friday desperation, and clowns collide with me and my bag as I stagger like a drunkard to keep myself conducive to upright and controlled motion. The stairway is filled with the elderly wearing complicated hobby costumes. I make it out unscathed and the fire alarm turns out to be something minor. In the aftermath, clowns mill about the hall. I watch other hotel guests try not to stare, I try not to stare, employees try not to stare, but everyone is staring.

In one regard, the convention feels like any other: like-minded people who share an interest in something, people who love it in a manner much deeper than your average bystander, who know it in incredible detail. But amid the camaraderie, in the spaces between the cliques, the atmosphere is softly bristled. After the seminar, the conversations taking place among the stragglers return to the shortage. “If the clown shortage is real, I’d be having an easier time gettin’ work!”

In spite of the current backlash, clowns are still more than an easy punch line or sight gag. Floyd Mayweather Jr. — the highest-paid athlete in the world — hired a clown procession to lead him into the ring for his win over Marco Maidana. Juggalos have made clowns a symbol of empowerment. A video of Puddles, a tall, sad clown, singing Lorde has more than 8 million views on YouTube. Julia Louis-Dreyfus had clown sex in a GQ spread. (OK, maybe that was a sight gag.) The interesting thing hidden in the guarded humor of this convention is not some piecemeal insight into why people dislike a comedic figure — it’s why, all of this sentiment to the contrary, the clown persists as a cultural icon, revered or feared. There seems to be a perverse and abiding fascination, if even a morbid one. But why? I mean, you clicked on this, right?

Armando L. Sanchez for BuzzFeed

The hotel lobby is decorated to theme — a nice touch, but conspicuous. The balloon art displayed at the front desk isn’t just festive; it’s a signal to the non-clown guests. The inflated, latex animal serves as a polite catalyst for inquiry, such that a hospitable warning might be offered.

I am not afraid of clowns. But there’s something that happens when you walk into the forgettable bathroom of a hotel lobby and meet a fully made-up clown standing by the sink, reflection staring back at you with the Kubrickian blankness of a greasepaint grimace.

I almost wet my pants.

Media seminar fresh in my head, I choke the gasp in my throat and try to smile. While I am going for “warm and effusive,” I’m sure my face is more a pained amalgamation of terror. I can only hope that she thinks I'm trying to be polite. I’m sure she gets it all the time.

But. There are reasons people can find clowns to be so unsettling. That makeup: white face; huge, red mouth; drawn-on smile; eyebrows that kiss the hairline. “When it's up close, it's the visual equivalent of being screamed at,” explains Jaron Aviv Hollander, the co-founder and artistic director of the Kinetic Arts Center in Oakland. And it’s all the big top’s fault: When a clown is standing in one of three or more rings and playing to a huge crowd, the audience needs to be able to read familiar facial landmarks in order to get the bit.

Hollander, a Cirque du Soleil alum and co-creator of “The Submarine Show,” a two-man mime act that played Edinburgh Fringe Festival, says there’s a very practical reason behind some of our collective clown discomfort. “Stephen King didn’t make that scary,” he says, referring to the traditional makeup worn by Pennywise the Clown in King’s It. “He found something that was scary and wrote about it,” adding that the inherent cognitive dissonance between applied makeup and natural expression adds to the creepiness factor. “The makeup is just a mask, and when you do, like, a big smile or a frown or something, that’s an emotion, and you can see the lie.” He is, however, quick to note that within the proper context, like a circus, the makeup is effective. “There are brilliant clowns who do that, and when they're in [their element], they're not going to be scary.”

The hotel restaurant is filled with clowns eating lunch and tapping listlessly on their phones. I watch passersby pose for pictures with an older gentleman on stilts dressed in full clown regalia. Leaning against the check-in desk, Mr. Stilts serves up a glitter-filled grenade at conformism. By embodying a living, breathing icebreaker, talking to people as they wrap their arms around him for pictures, he’s not so quietly breaking the taboo of how you’re supposed to interact with strangers.

Being at the convention involves a dizzying array of stimuli, seamlessly flip-flopping between nice and creepy. (Hotel guests taking pictures and squealing with glee? Nice. Sad clown sitting alone, smoking in his car in the parking lot? Creepy.) Lisa Hinshaw of Illinois got into clowning when her daughter was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, as a way to reach her and connect emotionally. The same way early Disney characters were designed to emote distillations of human emotions so pure that dialogue was superfluous, clowning, too, is in the business of entertainment that doesn’t need words to first be understood. The clowning helped this woman reach her daughter, and she's been doing it ever since.

One of the vacant conference rooms is a standard bare, carpeted cube, filled with banquet tables and white tablecloths and squat, brown, hotel trash cans, perfectly forgettable, save for a jack-in-the-box costume with a life-size clown dummy spilling over the top, mid-spring. The box is big enough for one adult or several children to hide under, the jack’s face contorted into an open maw of gruesome surprise or delighted sadism. The clown has the empty stare of a corpse, and there’s no way to know if there’s someone inside the box right now, waiting to jump out. It’s clown inception, a clown within a clown, possibly within another clown. I cannot stay in the room with it.

I go downstairs and peek in at the clown camp, which right now appears to be a dozen or so small children playing with circus toys in a room and having the most joyous kind of nondescript fun. But I don’t see many teenagers or evidence of a next generation poised to carry on these traditions from aging professionals; in fact, the seminar on mentoring up-and-comers is mostly focused on teaching tips and theater games.

Like most conventions, this one is highly specific. If clowning were Halloween, the WCA Convention would be a megachurch Halloween-alternative party. And while maybe the church party with caramel popcorn and novelty Bibles might have a hard time filling the place year after year, to many people it’s a cherished tradition and a haven inside a corrupt holiday. Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind that these wholesome circus clowns are just one niche in a universe of clowning that shows no signs of truly disappearing. And it’s not just senior citizens getting their silly on.

It’s the friend of mine who has his toddler in circus arts classes. Or the sportswriter I like so much who went to a prestigious clown school in France. Or my favorite bartender, who used to busk on the street in full clown regalia, playing a child’s piano and sitting on a tiny stool. Or my dear friend of over a decade who only recently told me about his childhood experience with clown camp. Or...me, who played the canine clown role of Blue the dog in a North American tour of Blue’s Clues Live! Ask around, and you’ll probably be surprised by how many clowns you know.

Armando L. Sanchez for BuzzFeed

So, when did the clown emerge in our history? “I don’t know,” Hollander says, laughing. “I think that it goes back to a point when cavemen are sitting around a campfire, making fart jokes.”

He’s not wrong. Across the ages, from court jesters to fools on stage, clowns have used physical comedy to do important work. By acknowledging taboos and doing the wrong thing the right way (like falling in love with an inanimate object) or the right thing the wrong way (fishing in a lobster tank), or by just outright flying past the fuzzy, culturally sanctioned limits of propriety, clowns function as society’s pressure valve.

Aristotle says in Poetics that comedy and satire originated with phallika — ritual clowning in the form of a penis parade. These parades were a common feature of the cult of Dionysus, filled with obscenities, verbal abuse, and, of course, penises.

Photo of dance by kachina dancers of the Hopi pueblo of Shongopavi, Ariz. Photo taken between 1870 and 1900.

Underwood & Underwood Publishers

Ritual clowns in the Zuni tribe cure illness through dance, speaking truth to power with sharp-edged paradoxes of current events. They also eat things like urine, feces, pebbles, and ash to prove the superiority of their own stomachs. (And, I imagine, to provide an emetic for those in need.)

Americans tend to think primarily of circus clowns and children’s entertainment. Greasepaint, red nose, giant shoes, loud wig, that sort of thing. But clowning as an art form is — and for a long time has been — a way that humans turn our fears and inadequacies into the foundation of community and intimacy. It’s hard not to feel like we’ve lost something weird and wonderful by making clowns into scary, carnivalesque villains.

“The clown perhaps is this important figure that allows us to see ourselves in our naked, humiliating glory and to be able to laugh at ourselves,” says Quinn Bauriedel, co-founder and co-artistic director of the Obie Award-winning Pig Iron Theatre and director of the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training. “The clown is kind of helping us admit to ourselves that we are fundamentally stupid and perhaps poetically stupid,” adding that he uses that word to mean “something wonderful, not something horrible.”

“When someone trips and falls, we look and we laugh because secretly we're like, I'm glad that person tripped and fell and it wasn't me.” He confesses that he fell down yesterday, and that yes, someone laughed at him.

Which is, of course, the beauty of the clown. “This little red nose helps us to seek out our own idiosyncrasies and neuroses and foibles and begin to share those in public so that other people can laugh at them, form community, and realize that, in some fundamental ways, we all fail.”

Armando L. Sanchez for BuzzFeed

Universal Pictures

This is not a eulogy. This is not a neatly smug explanation for why we should have seen this coming. I will not be digging blindly into a dead man’s head, nor will I perform a full transnasal craniotomy with a long, slender hook. I know him only as a clown, a man with the rare gift of telling the uncensored truth while making its existence bearable. This is not a think piece on the cultural importance of Dead Poets Society or the labor practices in Hook. It’s not a list of his 13 funniest moments, a sallow retrospective on his darker roles, a reprinted interview from decades past, copious arm-hair fetish erotica, or a callous analysis of the physical aspects of his suicide. No, this is fumbling through the sick sense of recognition.

When the news broke of Robin Williams' death, I’d just settled into a faded lime settee, my sweaty August thighs adding to the body fluids no doubt collected on the velvet upholstery. The hot dredges of summer daylight, the kind already slipping through our proverbial fingers, poured unencumbered through a wide window that seemed to pluck the fading light right out of the clouds. It was the second half of a long workday, the part where I crawl into my favorite bar and sit in the corner like a sullen cat and make strange, grimacing faces while banging away at a keyboard. I opened my laptop and I saw it: Robin Williams, apparent suicide. And I believed it immediately.

For most of this calendar year, I’ve been researching clowns. Talking to clowns, reading about clowns, spending time around clowns, and generally amassing a book’s worth of clown trivia. (For instance, Hugh Jackman used to be a birthday party clown.) And while there was certain levity at times, I was struck by how much sadness was seeping through cracks everywhere I looked. There’s the tragedy of Joseph Grimaldi, the progenitor of the iconic clown whiteface and one of the biggest entertainers of his day, who lost his first wife and baby during childbirth, watched his son die an alcoholic, tried to commit suicide and failed, and died a broken, penniless drunk. There’s Barry Lubin, better known as Grandma the Clown, who regaled me with his history of alcoholism, depression, cancer, divorce, and loss. Heartfelt stories came pouring out of strangers and friends alike, all signaling to me that the sad clown isn’t just an archetype; it’s part of what makes them great. Something about life in the darkness makes one cherish those moments in the light.

At first, it seems a great cosmic irony that Williams dedicated his life to inspiring the kind of joy and release he could never really give himself. But I get it. And, of course, he did.

For me, a lifetime of depression has meant that I grew up feeling like the awkward assemblage of my own biological chaos was woefully inadequate, like a pebble in someone’s shoe, some tiny, insignificant nuisance to be found, removed, and absolved. People assured me that it gets better, to just keep trying, to do something nice for myself, to find joy in daily life. They can fix you, they said. You don’t have to be like this. Let me tell you how to fix this. We need to fix you.

It always seemed like bullshit. How does one start to climb out of a cave that seems completely air-tight?

Whereas other brains might feature a home built with treated lumber, finished with something shiny and easy to clean, I’m more of a pile of raw wood. It’s a little too much empathy, perhaps, or maybe just not enough serotonin floating around upstairs. But whatever the cause, I saw myself in Robin Williams. I learned there was power in laughing at your demons, and the sweetest glimpses of amelioration in unleashing laughter in others. A master of the art of clowning — that is, mocking those in power with impunity and relieving the quiet anxieties of social taboos — Williams was the consummate performer. And, like so many other great clowns, it seems his appreciation of joy must have, in some way, been borne out of excruciating pain.

I think there’s such beauty in the clown. I don’t mean this with any schmaltzy pretense; I mean it in the same way one is the lowest common denominator of all whole numbers. Like how farts can make even babies giggle. The way it’s hard not to laugh when someone falls down. The way it feels so, so good to make someone smile.

The way it can reach people who think themselves unreachable.

Imagine you have a house full of appliances, but you’ve never had electricity and have no idea that other people do. And then one day, the power just fucking turns on, and everything whirs to life, and suddenly the darkness is not only kept at bay. That’s what it felt like when I finally got on the right medication a few months ago. This was soon followed by a churning horror I’ve yet to shake that settled into my guts when I finally realized how sick I’d been. Depression can also be like a house full of cat piss: After a while, you just get used to it.

When Williams died, I suddenly felt reconnected to my years of loneliness in a way I couldn’t experience before treatment. I still cannot shake how deeply isolated I felt when in the depths of my illness, how I felt rejected by many of the people trying to help me. Which is why, in huge, choking sobs, in the middle of an empty bar, I erupted into grief for Robin Williams, knowing full well that I’m only here because my suicide attempts were unsuccessful, and so I got to stick around for another go at treatment. But in those tears was also an outpouring of gratitude: He taught me that I might be fucked up, but so was he, and weren’t we all, anyway?

I believe that one of the kindest things you can say to a person is simply this: You’re fucked up, and that’s OK. And that’s what I heard in him. He seemed as fearless as he did troubled, and the way he spoke candidly about everything from cunnilingus tongue fatigue to harrowing mental illness made me feel like maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t so bad to be stuck inside this brain of mine. That life is generally ridiculous and messy, and we are all so deeply screwed up, and, given the choice of laughter or tears, your best bet is to dance on the edge and revel in the absurd intimacy of the two.

Robin Williams walked that razor edge between laughing and crying, gathering up the mishmash of our poetically stupid humanity and reflecting it back to us with such compassion that we saw not the tally of our insufficiencies, but the glorious sum of our parts. A consummate reminder that everything is ridiculous, we are never as alone as we think we are.

We’re all fucked up, and that’s OK.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Without proven treatments or vaccines, our arsenal in the fight against Ebola consists of contact-tracing, decontamination, and prevention. Sealing off access to human bodies is our only battle-tested weapon, because you can’t get Ebola if you don’t touch Ebola.

For health care and burial workers in the “splash zone” — the area in which a person can get splashed with bodily fluids — recommended personal protective equipment (PPE) looks like a cartoon space suit. But aesthetics be damned; this level of protection seals out the wet danger of a hot zone with layer upon layer of waterproof materials. It’s the garb of choice for situations that slosh.

However, Ebola is not so easily transmitted via casual contact. Earlier this summer, Craig Manning, a spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said that if he had a choice between being in a room with an Ebola patient or an influenza patient, he’d pick Ebola. His reasoning was that one can stay out of the splash zone, but it’s hard to avoid breathing in shared air. As such, workers who aren’t expected to encounter large quantities of infectious fluids wear streamlined PPE. And, with a little practice and attention to detail, it’s actually not that hard to do.

For example, when a flight from Newark had to be decontaminated after a passenger exhibited Ebola-like symptoms, the CDC guidelines for PPE were as follows: waterproof gloves (double-gloving recommended if cleaning large amounts of bodily fluids); surgical mask; eye goggles or a face shield; long-sleeved, waterproof gown; and rubber boots or shoe covers if there could be splashing. The goal is to protect all skin and mucous membranes from the cleaning chemicals in use, some of which could be hot with Ebola. This basic protective ensemble is also the minimum PPE recommended for hospital custodial and service personnel who are working outside the splash zone but in the vicinity of infected patients.

As important as the gear itself is the order in which you put it on and take it off. One must be vigilant to avoid the PPE version of panties-before-garter-belt, because sequence can literally make the difference between life and death.

Recently, the protocol has changed. Previously, the CDC’s general PPE poster said that goggles should be removed before the gown, but the CDC now recommends the gown come off prior to the goggles. The change gives more protection to the highly vulnerable eyes, nose, and mouth.

In addition, the CDC just added recommendations to wear a protective hood to cover the neck as well as fluid-resistant leg and feet coverings. These new recommendations appear to be aimed at people working in the splash zone and not those who are merely working nearby — although when asked directly on Thursday, the CDC did not say whether its new PPE guidelines applied to all PPE or just the type worn in the splash zone. An agency spokesperson said the CDC is reviewing its guidelines.

We will update this post as we learn more, but here are instructions on general — not splash-zone — PPE that were reviewed by the CDC on October 13.

Before you get started, please make sure that you have designated a safe place for PPE removal, a place for biohazardous waste collection, and a designated buddy to check your protective garb for loose ties or holes or other unseen calamities. It probably goes without saying that it should be someone you trust. Or you can just use a mirror.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Now, go ahead and put on a pair of inner gloves, which we’re going to treat like your skin. These are your new bare hands; do not get them contaminated and do not be lulled into false complacency by their presence. They will remain on until the very end. Accept this as your new normal, and seriously, stop touching your face.

Ready? OK.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Step one is to put on the waterproof gown in the backward-bathrobe style of those glorified napkins they give patients to wear in the hospital. Make sure the gown covers from the neck to the knees, reaches all the way down to the wrists, and wraps around to tie securely in the back at the neck and waist. Do not, in your zeal for protection, tie impossible knots. You are going to have to untie these later. Remember that.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Next up is the surgical mask. Place it on your face and tie it securely around the back of your head and at the top of the neck. Then — and this is important — bend that little metal bit at the top edge of the mask to fit your nose. This is not something you can do later, as touching your face with contaminated hands defeats the entire purpose of suiting up. Make sure the mask covers you from up on the nose to below the chin and that it fits close to the face. Hope you brushed your teeth.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Once the mask is secured, pop those goggles on and adjust everything for a snug, perfect fit. Then check everything and adjust again. Make sure you haven’t screwed up your mask and then do another full recheck. Repeat as necessary. There will be no goggle-adjusting later, for obvious reasons. (Alternate option: Wear one of those “human windshield” face visors.)

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Last step is the gloves, which should be pulled up over the cuff of the gown. Be sure to tuck your sleeves into your gloves, and snugly. Sometimes people wear two pairs of gloves for additional protection — and easy replacement. Gloves must be replaced if they become too soiled, so double-bagging it means you can change them without untucking your sleeves and exposing yourself.

And you’re finished!

When wearing PPE, try to touch as few surfaces as possible and don’t mess with your gear. Fussing with things like ties, elastics, and fit at this point is verboten — you are going to have to touch some of those ties later, OK? They are precious and must remain pure.

Now comes the fun part. After baking in your protective cocoon, you get to peel that thing off. How you do this makes all the difference to successful PPE. Just like a great striptease, removing PPE is a deliberate act full of purpose, not a haphazard, utilitarian flailing. (It’s like the game The Floor Is Lava, but the outside of your PPE is the lava, and instead of lava, it’s Ebola.)

The first thing to go are the gloves. Do not — DO NOT — hook your finger inside the glove for removal. The way you would normally remove a glove — by sticking your fingers inside and pulling — would contaminate your “bare skin” glove. Instead, after a good rinse with some alcohol, pinch the outside of the glove with the opposite, still gloved hand, and then peel it off gently, letting it turn inside out during the process. You’ll wind up with a little wad of inside-out glove in the fingertips of your still-gloved hand; palm it and grip the shit out of it.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

For the other hand, do not — DO NOT — do what you just did to the first glove and pinch the outside of it. You might want to because it’s how you took the first glove off, but your free hand is now inner-glove only. That means you can slip your finger into the clean interior of the remaining glove, hook it from the inside, and peel it off around the balled-up remains of its mate, creating a neat little dirty — and possibly biohazardous — glove bundle. Throw it away in the safe place you designated for biohazardous waste disposal.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

To remove the gown safely, you must do so without touching the outside of it. Undo the ties in the back, and then, with your bare hands, reach down the front at the neck and push it away from your body from the inside; keep going until you turn the gown inside out, then fold it so the nasty is on the inside and roll it into a bundle for disposal, safe-side out. You can practice this technique with a Snuggie or other vaguely embarrassing blanket with arms.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Now you can remove your goggles. Use your bare hands to touch only the strap on the back of your head. Do not touch the front of the goggles with your naked fingers. Gingerly drop that shit in the reprocessing bucket or the special trash. You’re almost free.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

Next, you can take that disgusting mask off and feel something other than mouth breathing on your face. Untie the straps, touch nothing else, and gingerly remove it away from the body. Your chin will rejoice, finally free from the sauna of your stale, wet air.

Remove those inner gloves and you are fully doffed! Now wash your hands with alcohol-based hand sanitizer.

Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed News

One last word of caution, though: Always be aware of your surroundings when dressing.

"I was in this cave in Uganda when bats were being captured for a necropsy,” said the CDC’s Manning, who often assists researchers in the field. He was helping trap and test bats to search for signs of Marburg virus, a lethal cousin of Ebola, and he was suited up to avoid exposure. “I mean, you've been in bat caves; they're just nasty places. They're slippery, they're dark, and you're easily off-balance. At a certain point, I had this searing, burning, stinging pain from the left corner of my left eye, under my face shield, while inside the cave.” He stayed calm but thought, Oh wow, things are going south really fast.

“I had this huge, huge desire to just take my gloved hand and reach it under the face shield and start rubbing the corner of my eye to figure out what might be in there flailing around,” he said via phone from his office in Atlanta. “But, of course, that’s a bad idea.”

Manning also realized that, in addition to the searing pain, the protective barrier of his Tyvek suit wasn’t quite so safe anymore. “The integrity of that barrier had kind of evaporated. I thought to myself, This can't be good.” So he carefully left the cave, and that’s when he put the clues together.

“I noticed that there were some red ants near to where I had been suiting up that morning. What I think might have happened is that the ant landed somehow on my skin and I went into the cave, didn't know it was there because it was so hot and smelly. By the time it'd found an area of mucosa by my eye, it started to bite, and that's what I was experiencing as a searing pain.”

Manning said, “Everybody on the team could tell you stories like that.” And with that, he burst into laughter.

buzzfeed.com

Ebola has been winning this from the start. Since the outbreak began in March, the grim reality of the virus’s march through West Africa and beyond has been laid out in a growing string of data points, the graph showing the number of cases swooping upward in that telltale pattern of exponential growth. The outbreak broke 10,000 cases right around the time the World Health Organization warned of a future with 10,000 cases a week. This isn’t just a fight; this is a war. Which is why, if we are going to beat Ebola, we are going to need an army.

But not the 4,000 troops President Obama recently made available to be sent to countries ravaged by the epidemic. To outsmart the virus, we must raise an army to fight Ebola where it counts the most: inside the body.

Treatment saves those already infected, but vaccines stop the spread of the virus. Treat Ebola and you may save the patient, but not before the virus has ample opportunity to jump to a caretaker or neighbor or someone else. The only way to end the war is to stop infections from happening in the first place.

Period.

There are at least two promising vaccines in the pipeline. These vaccines will need to train the elegant and maddeningly complicated defense systems of the human body to find and destroy Ebola virons before they can get a hold inside the body.

Your body, in all of its warm, wet, and dark wonder, makes a great home for many organisms looking to get out of the cold, bright, dry world around them. Life arose from the ocean, and we carry a reminder of that precious, ancient home inside our skin as we move about through our desiccant world on land; naturally, we’re an appealing place to try to break into.

This isn’t always terrible. We form alliances with many microorganisms — such as the beneficial gut microbes we rely on for digestion. But not all guests are so well behaved. Some of them act like squatters who occasionally deface property; others slip in and set fire to everything in their sights. And your immune system must be able to remember the faces of all the inimical intruders.

Determining friend or foe sounds deceptively simple until you consider not only the diversity of cell types and tissues in the human body, but also the multitude of bacteria, fungi, and viruses a body must successfully identify and chose whether or not to fight. Which would explain how the immune system came to be a sprawling and highly coordinated biochemical military-industrial conglomerate, second only to the nervous system in terms of complexity.

And, perhaps even more incredibly, with inoculations we learned that we could send our immune systems pages of biological cables with detailed instructions on training troops to meet the threats yet unseen. Ladies and gentlemen, meet your own private infantry.

Your defenses break down into two categories: innate and acquired. Innate immunity is the stuff you’re born with, such as skin, mucus for trapping things, stomach acid to ward off food poisoning, and a cough reflex to eject those that would enjoy the kush digs of your delicate lungs. (Your innate immunity also includes types of white blood cells that attack certain very common invaders.)

On the other hand, acquired immunity is built and trained from scratch. How does it learn? From exposure to antigens, a catchall term for anything that can provoke an immune response, be it biological or not, including things such as pieces of viruses and bacteria, toxins, drugs, even a splinter in your finger. Over the course of your lifetime, your acquired immune system will learn to recognize millions of threats and develop ways to deal with all of them.

That your acquired immune system can only fight what it has been specifically trained to recognize honestly sounds fucking insane: The cells and proteins tasked with protecting your fragile meat sack have to learn to fight each new invader. From the ground up. This is how it happens.

Say you’re chewing your nail on the bus. It’s probably fine because most of the crap under your fingernails is stuff you’ve encountered before. But maybe today, you decide to go in for some cuticle, nibbling off just enough skin to create a shallow, irritating wound on the side of your finger, laying out a welcome mat for the bacteria ever hopeful for a trip inside. The breach in your flesh-based hazmat suit sounds an alarm, calling all manner of soldiers to the location to begin the process of defense and repair, furiously working amid a cacophony of chemical signalling to destroy the foreign invaders. There’s a problem, and the immune system is on it. (One only needs to look how quickly bacteria riot through the body after death to get a sense of just how busy the immune system is, 24/7.)

This isn’t to imply that the relationship between you and your immune system is a friendly one, however. In fact, the tenuous peace between the two of you is known as “self-tolerance.” Given the opportunity, your immune system will happily and swiftly turn on you, as anyone with an autoimmune disorder can attest. In fact, the only reason your immune system isn’t carpet bombing you right now is because the outside of your cells have proteins on them that the patrolling troops recognize as part of the same team: self, not other.

When the infantry arrives at the site of the wound, they get right to work, identifying non-self materials and looking for familiar antigens. For all the antigens you’ve encountered, your body keeps a few copies of the cells, called B cells, that can recognize them; when one of these cells sees an old foe, it slaps an antibody on it like a condemned sign, sealing its fate and marking it for destruction. It also initiates a process to ramp up a full army of other cells that can fight that one antigen.

But say there’s something new in your cut. Something that slips by the initial defenses, a bacteria or virus that your immune system has never before encountered. Your immune system will send specialized cells to find and eat these strangers, breaking them down and shoving the foreign antigens onto their own cell surfaces like big, neon “kill me” signs. This sends out the call to killer T cells, which find the marked cells and destroy them.

Meanwhile, helper T cells show up and start sending dispatches near and far, calling B cells to the area to ramp up antibody production, as well as more killer T cells and cells equipped to deal with the wreckage and subsequent garbage disposal.

However, there is one downside to this elegant solution: You have to get the disease and win the battle before your body will have the information it needs to beat it again. That’s no problem with the common cold. But it’s a big problem with Ebola, which is currently killing half of its victims.

With vaccines, however, we’ve figured out how to train our immunological militias to fight dangers yet unseen. A jab with a needle and we can load in a warning that says, “This is the enemy. Learn to fight it. Remain vigilant.” And in the race to halt the epidemic burning through West Africa, vaccine researchers are working to present Ebola’s dirty T-shirt to the bloodhounds patrolling your streams. One good whiff and they’ll recognize Ebola the way sharks always know when there’s blood in the water.

Traditionally, vaccines have been made one of two ways: killed or weakened. A killed virus, like Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, teaches the immune system to fight by using the corpses of dead viruses. A weakened, or “attenuated,” virus does the same, but with a version of the virus that is unable to infect the host. The former is a punching bag, the latter a gentle sparring partner.

The Ebola vaccines currently being tested are a newer breed, relying on cut-and-paste molecular biology to clip precise snippets of Ebola genetic material and plunk them into an entirely different — and harmless — virus. It’s the immunological equivalent of a lamb in wolf’s clothing, teaching the body to fight Ebola by creating a safe version that looks like the real thing.

The first vaccine is GlaxoSmithKline’s cAd3-EBO Z, which rolled out its phase one clinical trial last month. (A phase one trial doesn’t try to determine if the vaccine works. Rather, it tests whether the vaccine is safe and whether it provokes a robust immune response.) This vaccine is being developed in collaboration with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The second, which healthy volunteers began testing this month in a phase one trial, is rVSV-ZEBOV. Developed by Public Health Agency of Canada, it’s been licensed by the American company NewLink Genetics.

How these vaccines are built reads like bizarro science fiction. The Glaxo vaccine pops a little segment of harmless Ebola code into a virus that gives chimpanzees the sniffles, while its Canadian cousin sews a stretch of Ebola’s genetic material into a virus that makes cows break out in skin ulcers.

For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to call them Chimp Sniffles and Cow Blister, respectively.

Cow Blister (rVSV-ZEBOV) started out as a vesicular stomatitis virus, VSV. A member of the Rhabdoviridae family – which also includes rabies and the lesser-known lettuce necrotic yellows virus – this virus infects livestock: cattle, horses, pigs.

When animals get sick with VSV, they look like Seabiscuit with nightmare herpes, their lips and cheeks blooming with fluid-filled mucosal vesicles and raw ulcerations. Infections in humans are very rare and have been reported in cases of direct exposure such as a lab accident and contact with infected animals; thankfully, in people it is also much less aesthetically confrontational, resulting in a mild flu-like illness, if symptoms even bother to show up at all.

One of the proteins encoded in VSV’s genome is its envelope, a sheath that covers all the other proteins of the virus. VSV’s envelope is what allows the virus to break into the cell by mimicking the secret biochemical handshake of a more welcome protein. And, lucky for us, it turns out that the VSV envelope is also what causes disease.

What happens from here is your basic Mr. Potato Head. Researchers chunk out the envelope gene from their Cow Blister virus, which simultaneously weakens it and removes the virus’s genetic blueprints for causing harm. The warm spot left by the now-gone VSV envelope gene is then reclaimed by that of an Ebola envelope gene. The technical term for such swappery is recombination. Cow Blister is a live, attenuated recombinant, vesicular stomatitis virus-cum-vaccine vector, which is a really precise way of saying it’s something harmless dressed up in an Ebola costume. Teach the guards to recognize the costume so when the real deal shows up, everybody already knows who they are, preventing the Ebola virus from slipping under the immunogenic radar, as is its modus operandi. And no: You cannot get Ebola from this vaccine any more than you can fill your stomach with the aroma of food cooking.

GSK’s “Chimp Sniffles” (cAd3-EBO Z) does the same thing with a different virus, an chimp adenovirus, which causes the common cold in our primate cousins. Originally, researchers were super hot for adenoviruses as a potential vectors for gene therapy. Today, they have been comprehensively studied, so researchers are able to precisely customize these viruses — with minimal surprises.

The Chimp Sniffles vaccine was built to trick the immune system into thinking it is fighting Ebola by splicing benign bits of it into the chimpanzee-derived adenovirus — a cold virus. This recombination of genetic material is the same cut-and-paste as in the previously discussed vaccine — the envelope of the adenovirus is removed and replaced by the Ebola envelope. When this amalgamated virus is introduced to the body, it hops right on existing cellular machinery and starts pumping out the harmless Ebola protein it’s been designed to express.

Once the body notices the Ebola envelope protein, it starts churning out specialized patrol guards, training them to recognize the new and hostile contortions of amino acids. That way, if a person ever meets the real Ebola virus, their immune system will be ready to fight it off.

So far, the vaccine has only been tested in humans to see if it’s safe, not if it works. But in monkeys, both vaccines have been shown to protect the animals from an injection of Ebola.

Moreover, the Cow Blister vaccine has also shown promise in monkeys as a treatment after they had already contracted Ebola.

However, according documents obtained by ScienceInsider from an Oct. 23 meeting at the World Health Organization, even the best case scenario for vaccine deployment in the field is months away. Currently, Glaxo’s vaccine is the furthest along in development; the preliminary data from its phase 1 trial should be ready for analysis by November. If the results are promising, efficacy trials could begin in January. Glaxo also outlined how production could be scaled up during the trial period, so that the vaccine could be ready for wider distribution by April 2015. That is an extremely fast track for a vaccine — the process usually takes years — and it assumes that all goes perfectly with the trials.

This is Ebola. Learn to fight it. Remain vigilant.

Chances are, you’ll never need to suit up against Ebola — but just in case, here’s how to do it. Update: This post includes new recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

View Entire Post ›

Vaccines are the best way to stop the Ebola epidemic. Here’s how they work and what you need to know about the two experimental ones that are furthest along.

View Entire Post ›