50% Reduction in Deaths: Before Vaccines, Doctors ‘Borrowed’ Antibodies from Recovered Patients to Save Lives

The article says they're currently exploring using this, but I haven't heard anything about this in the news. Seems like a massive game changer in terms of being something we can actively utilize instead of laying down like victims and whining that a vaccine is 18 months out.

Less than 50%...


[link to history.com (secure)]

Von Behring’s antitoxin wasn’t a vaccine, but the earliest example of a treatment method called “convalescent plasma” that’s being resurrected as a potential treatment for COVID-19. Convalescent plasma is blood plasma extracted from an animal or human patient who has “convalesced” or recovered from infection with a particular disease.

“Convalescent plasma has been used throughout history when confronting an infectious disease where you have people who recover and there’s no other therapy available,” says Warner Greene, director of the Center for HIV Cure Research at the Gladstone Institutes. “There must be something in their plasma—i.e. an antibody—that helped them recover.”

After von Behring’s antitoxin was distributed worldwide to treat diphtheria in 1895, doctors experimented with the same passive immunity technique for curing measles, mumps, polio and influenza.

During the pandemic influenza outbreak of 1918 known as the “Spanish flu,” fatality rates were cut in half for patients who were treated with blood plasma compared to those who weren’t. The method seemed particularly effective when patients received the antibodies in the early days of their infection, before their own immune systems had a chance to overreact and damage vital organs. In the 1930s, doctors like Gallagher used convalescent plasma effectively against measles.

Last Edited by The Philosopher Stoned on 03/31/2020 09:17 PM