I thought that I had posted a thread on this some time back, but a flaying of the hamsters yielded nothing.
Years ago, on PBS, there was a documentary on an outbreak of ebola in what was then Zaire. The documentary covered the efforts of the Zairian medical team and WHO medical teams in attempting to contain the outbreak. As the outbreak was winding down, the Zairian nurse apparently contracted ebola. This threw the Zairian doctors into a bit of a panic, nurses being somewhat rare in that part of the world, so the doctors decided to try a desperate gamble. They took blood from a patient who was the same blood type as the nurse and had survived the disease and transfused it into the nurse. She survived. The doctors then proceeded to do this with the remaining 20 people who were suffering from ebola. Out of those 20 people, something like 19 survived the disease.
The WHO doctors were furious! In interviews they kept saying that it was a dangerous, unscientific method and should never have been performed. I fail to see what the problem was. You have a disease that can have up to a 90% fatality rate and reduced that to 10%.
Now, granted, that’s a relatively small sample, but considering that the disease has a high fatality rate, and that doctors can do little to help the patient, it strikes me that there really was no harm in trying this. After all, if you’ve been handed a death sentence, a slim chance at survival is better than none at all. So what was wrong with what the Zairian doctors did?
If that is true ( WHO isn’t very helpful about it ), they would probably be more outraged over the, as they say, dangerous and unscientific methods used in the cure.
Unfortunately, medicine is one of those tricky fields that you have a lot of moral problems in. You have to experiment to cure a disease, but you have to be careful in how you do it. Health organizations are fairly careful about restricting testing (at least on humans) to as little as possible, to prevent exploitation and human experimentation. This may be bad for something like an emergency treatment for ebola, but it is in place to prevent something horrible from happening… like a “mad scientist” experimenting on people, or a virus getting released into the general population and running out of control coughHIV?cough. They tend to get a little touchy when people start going around slopping stuff together. The effect of a blood transfusion from a healtly/recovering patient to a newly ill patient may not seem like a big deal, but you never know, and you certainly can’t get into the habbit.
Of course, IAMAD, so there may be something else entirely to it.
Using the blood of a recovering/recovered person to treat a disease in not unprecedented. In the developed world, the blood is normally processed to refine the specific component (immune gobulin) that is effective from the rest of the mix. It can work, because the recovered person’s body is producing effective antibodies.
The downside, of course, are all those diseases that can be spread by blood - HIV, malaria, syphillis, other stuff. So at the least there would be concern about that. Maybe they had other worries, too, but can’t think of any off-hand
The documentary I saw showed that the WHO doctors were upset because the experimental treatment was administered without a control group. They said that some of the patients should have been given a placebo. This would give some indication whether the recoveries were brought about by the transfusions or whether the group had simply contracted a less virulent strain of the disease.
The local doctors thought it would be unethical to spare any of their patients a possibly lifesaving treatment. The international team argued that they could save more lives in the long run by scientifically developing an effective cure.
Why bother with a control group on a fatal illness? An this really wouldn’t be an effective cure since you have to have someone survive the disease before you can use this. Better to “go for broke” in such a situation, than to “proceed with caution.”