Blood taken from the survivors of Ebola should be used to treat patients as a matter of priority as experts await results from safety trials of vaccines and drugs, the World Health Organizationsaid.
Whole blood transfusions have already been used to treat some patients in West Africa, Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health systems and innovation, said yesterday. The United Nations agency is helping governments in the affected countries to establish a system that can be reliably used to draw blood from survivors, prepare it and re-inject it safely into patients, she said.
The agency assessed a dozen drugs and vaccines in a two-day meeting, after a WHO ethics panel decided last month that unproven treatments could be used. While some of the experimental vaccines may finish safety trials within months, the blood of survivors, containing natural antibodies against the disease, are readily available in an outbreak in which 47 percent of more than 3,900 people infected have survived.
“This has a good chance to work and this is something that can be produced now from the affected countries,” Kieny said yesterday at a briefing in Geneva.
Survivor blood has been used before to treat Ebola. In 1995, during an outbreak in Kikwit in theDemocratic Republic of Congo, seven of eight infected people given the therapy survived during an outbreak with an 80 percent fatality rate.
Subsequent studies in monkeys have shown conflicting results, and Kieny said she didn’t know how many people in the present outbreak have been treated with a blood serum or what the results of those treatments may be. It’s a strategy worth trying while testing continues on other therapies.
via@Bloomberg