James Smith

Sepsis is a common cause of death for if you have a bacterial infection.

It's actually the third most common cause of death in the US once you're in the hospital.

So it's pretty common.

So it's pretty common, but it's also not that well understood, but basically

If you have myrobacteria in your blood, they're going to be replicating, using up nutrients.

And eventually those nutrients, they would have been used by your host cells for something.

There's a reason that they're there.

That's going to eventually start to cause some of your host cells, let's say in one of your organs, like your liver or something, to start to die.

And your immune system, your immune system is pretty amazing.

Like it can...

detect foreign things, but it can also detect when your own cells, when their insides are outside of them.

So that would start to happen.

These cells are dying and they're releasing their insides out into the body and that causes an immune response.

But when people have bacterial infections that are quite severe, that immune response often gets out of control and starts a positive feedback cycle where the immune system overreacts and that ultimately causes people to die.

I know.

Yeah.

It's pretty unfortunate.

Another way that it might happen is kind of if they got to extremely high concentrations, which would probably not usually happen with something other than myelobacteria.

it might physically start to block things or result in there not being enough oxygen in the blood for you to survive.

So there could be some really unusual pathologies.