Injecting the blood of Ebola survivors to patients did not seem to make any difference, doctors found in the biggest study do far on the approach, prompting some scientists to say it’s time to abandon the strategy.
With no licenced treatment for the disease, doctors have sometimes used blood from survivors to treat the sick, hoping its infection-fighting antibodies might help the patients defeat the virus.
This strategy seemed to help some patients in the past but there was no clear proof.
In the wake of the world’s biggest Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, scientists decided to put treatment in the test in Guinea.
In a research conducted at a clinic in the Guinean capital, Conakry, scientists found out that the was no difference in survival between 84 patients who got survivor blood compared to 400 patients who were treated five months earlier, according to the study ublished in New England Journal of Medicine Thursday.
“We would have liked to have seen more dramatic results,” said Johan van Griensven of the study in Guinea, the paper’s lead author. “But this doesn’t mean (blood) plasma treatment doesn’t work by definition.”
Johan said that antibody levels are often low in patients who have only recently recovered from Ebola, and that doctors might need to use blood from long-term survivors to get a better effect.
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