World Health Organization has recommended using Ebola survivors’ blood for treating other patients. This followed scientific revelation that people produce antibodies in the blood in an attempt to fight off an Ebola infection and in theory, those antibodies could be transferred from a survivor into a sick patient to give their immune system a boost, the BBC reported.
Dr Marie Paule Kieny, an assistant director general at WHO said that they have agreed that whole blood therapies might be used to treat Ebola virus and all efforts must be invested to help infected countries to use them.
There’s a real opportunity that a blood-derived product could be used now and this could be very effective in terms of treating patients, as there are also many people now who have survived and are doing well.
There’s no clinically proven drug or vaccine to treat Ebola, but many are in the experimental stage. The WHO also announced that Ebola vaccines could be used on the frontline by November.
It would be recalled that the toll from the Ebola virus disease in West Africa has risen to well over 1,000, leading the World Health Organisation (WHO) to approve the use of experimental drugs to fight the disease.
The UN health institution indicated that 52 more patients had died recently, while there were 69 new cases over the same period, bringing the number of affected to 1,848.
In a statement, the WHO’s Ethics Committee said that in the light of the scale of the outbreak and the high number of deaths, it was ethical to use untested drugs against the Ebola virus.
The announcement came as Liberia, one of the worst-affected countries with 323 deaths and 599 cases, prepared to receive experimental treatment from the US in the coming days.
Washington Tuesday agreed to provide Liberia with experimental serum ZMapp, which has been used with success on two US aid workers infected with Ebola in Liberia and repatriated to the US.
The move came after Liberia’s President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, asked the US for the drug to fight the virus.
The White House and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the request for the serum to treat Liberian doctors currently infected with the Ebola virus.
