Are Blood Transfusions the Key to Beating the Ebola Outbreak?
Are Blood Transfusions the Key to Beating the Ebola Outbreak? The World Health Organization has prioritized the use of blood transfusions for treating Ebola, and three patients have received blood donated by an American doctor who survived the disease. But a lack of scientific study means that a lot is still unclear about the method and whether it could feasibly scale up to treat the thousands of Ebola patients in West Africa.
Margaret Harris, a doctor and spokeswoman for the World Health Organization currently based in Sierra Leone said, “Using blood transfusion to treat a viral disease is a simple concept which has been around for at least 100 years.” In transplanting a survivor’s blood to another patient battling the same disease, doctors hope that the antibodies in the donated blood — which have already successfully fought off the disease — will do the same again.
According to some experts, blood transfusions should be used as a stopgap measure until a better solution is available as there is much that we don’t know about how it works. even if it were proven that blood transfusions are effective, there would be several obstacles to implement them on a large scale as transfusions involve consent from donors, the need for collecting blood in a sterile environment, and getting it screened for blood type and diseases like hepatitis and HIV. Many countries, especially those in Africa do not have the infrastructure for doing it.
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