This is being reported on local news stations. If someone is 14 days post detection and healthy their antibodies may be helpful to other patients. This is experimental.
If you google “plasma treatment for viral infection” you’ll get hits from February and later.
This one https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/05/how-blood-plasma-from-recovered-patients-could-help-treat-coronavirus/ mentions that the technique is not a new one.
There are safety concerns of course - as in, it could transmit other viruses (doesn’t mention HIV or Hep-C but those were the ones that jumped to my mind). IVIG is supposedly safer, per that article.
It’s definitely promising, and I hope it gets pursued.
I wouldn’t think that the safety issues would be greater than with any other transfusions.
How many treatments can be done with one donation?
Which medical authority or agency is requesting the donations? I’m assuming it’s not the local TV station itself.
I’m wondering if they could filter out the covid-19 specific antibodies and clone them to produce large numbers of them. We have FDA approved monoclonal antibody treatments for other conditions so it seems like it might be feasible.
I worded that very poorly.
I assume that it’s one or more hospitals. Philly has some of the world’s best teaching hospitals.
And also Hahnemann
AIDS, HepB, BSE… The risks of blood-born diseases are not always immediately obvious.
Of course there are risks, but we do transfusions all the time because there are times when the benefits outweigh the risks.
Didn’t Hahnemann close a few months ago?
Even if this blood or products can’t be used for transfusion, they can definitely be used for research.
Yes, it was a joke juxtaposing “world’s best teaching hospitals” with that shitshow of a hospital that shut down.
Yes, there are protocols to avoid AIDS and hepatitus and encephalopathies, which is why most of the people affected were affected before the protocols were put in place. And the protocols weren’t put into place until the conditions were understood.
Right now, COVID-19 is not well understood, and injecting someone with blood products from someone who has had a recent COVID-19 infection is not in the same class of activities as normal blood transfusion.