Chinese health authorities are asking people who have recovered from Coronavirus Covid-19 to donate blood, in order to extract the plasma. This could promote the healing of infected people.
The Covid-19 coronavirus continues to rage. The latest report from the Chinese authorities reports 72,000 people infected and 1886 dead in China. While containment measures are still in place to try to stem the spread of the virus, efforts are also being made to promote the recovery of the sick. And there could be something new.
On Monday, Chinese health authorities asked people cured of the coronavirus to donate their blood in order to extract the plasma to care for the sick who are still in serious condition. As a reminder, plasma is used to transport blood cells and hormones through the body.
This constituent of the blood of people who have already recovered, explains Guo Yanhong, an official of the Chinese National Health Commission, indeed contains many antibodies capable of reducing the viral load in severely affected patients.
Remember that antibodies are proteins made by the immune system to fight off invaders , such as viruses or bacteria. So the general idea is to "transfer immunity" from a cured person to a sick person.
Thanks to these transfusions, eleven patients hospitalized in Wuhan, the epicenter of the epidemic, are already on the mend. “One of them has already gone home, while another has been able to get up and walk said Sun Yanrong from the Biological Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology.
Just before these transfusions, several clinical trials carried out in a hospital in the city had shown that the condition of recipient patients could "improve within 24 hours and that the process was"safe" “.
Caution, though. As the director of emergency programs at the World Health Organization (WHO), Michael Ryan, has just recalled, the use of plasma from former patients “has already proven effective for some diseases, but not always.
“We're going to have to look at how it's used, which patients are most likely to benefit from its use, (and) at what point in the disease this practice brings a benefit “, he underlined during a press conference held in Geneva.
Source
Related articles:
