Blood from people who recover from coronavirus could provide a treatment

[meow2u3]

An old idea for fighting infections — an approach most physicians know about only from medical lore — is being revived as people wait for drugs and vaccines to thwart the novel coronavirus. If it works, the blood plasma of people who have recovered from covid-19 would be used to protect health-care workers and help sick people get well.

The possible therapy is based on a medical concept called “passive immunity.” People who recover from an infection develop antibodies that circulate in the blood and can neutralize the pathogen. Infusions of plasma — the whitish liquid that remains when blood cells are removed — may increase people’s disease-fighting response to the virus, giving their immune systems an important boost. The approach has been successful against polio, measles, mumps and flu.

“The recovered people could have in their blood something that could be very useful,” said Arturo Casadevall, chair of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The history is this has been used in 120 years in medicine, and it’s well-known.”

Casadevall is hopeful the treatment, called “convalescent plasma,” could provide short-term relief to a medical system that faces a surge of patients, with no approved drugs or vaccines. But he and colleagues face regulatory, logistical and scientific challenges to set up a process that will ultimately be limited in how many people it can treat. Researchers must collect blood plasma from people after they’ve recovered, then test it to determine if it is likely to be potent against the disease and deliver it to patients.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/27/coronavirus-serum-plasma-treatment/

What's old is new again--and it just might work.

[getagrip_already]

1. For the Rich...... (there, fixed it for you)....

This treatment will likely never make it into the mass population. There isn't enough of it being collected, and a lot that is is by private labs.

This will be a luxury treatment I fear.

[magicarpet]

5. Oh jeez, don't say that, you will give them ideas.

They will charge $80,000 for one injection to inoculate, so the free market will count the lower classes out.

You are likely correct.

[magicarpet]

2. Antibodies in the blood plasma, share them among one another,

Isn't the human body phenomenal ?

This could be the prophylactic remedy to this Coronavitus to protect healthcare workers trying to help those inflicted and in ICUs.

[DBoon]

3. Wasn't horse serum used in the old days like this?

Inject a horse with a human disease agent, horse produces antibodies, horse serum (concentrated blood plasma) used to fight disease

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/horse-serum

[magicarpet]

8. Blood type O or A/B negative ?

[RockRaven]

4. Like with PPE, like with testing, like with ICU beds, like with ventilators, the problem is

going to be volume. Developing a treatment which works but cannot be delivered to a large fraction of the patients who need it is, to the patients who remain untreated, indistinguishable from researchers engaging in mental masturbation.

Let's hope there are sufficient resources and coordination to scale it up to meet the need, if it works as well as expected.

[customerserviceguy]

6. Like a lot of younger people back in the mid-1970's

I got paid for plasma donations while I was in college. But the places that collect it are generally located in the seedy areas of big cities only, as far as I know.

This could be something that could ramp up, the most expensive part of such an operation would be the machinery needed to separate red blood cells from plasma.

[Javaman]

7. a bit more from the article...

"New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) announced his state would begin trying the treatment in patients stricken with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday it was helping facilitate access to the experimental treatment, while underscoring the need to establish safety and effectiveness. Mount Sinai Health System in New York announced this week it plans to begin transfers of antibody-rich plasma from recovered patients to people who are severely ill."

[magicarpet]

9. Health care workers need to be inoculated pronto.

With no access to PPE, they are sitting ducks in the ICU wards. Prophylactic prevention therapies better be forthcoming until a vaccine is available real quick or we will lose many of these heroes/heroines in the health care field.

trDumpie has proven he does not give a fuck about these folks.