Efforts to use experimental Ebola drugs in West Africa are now focused on therapies that use blood from survivors of the virus, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.
“WHO has been encouraged by the growth of interest in convalescent therapies as an already bad epidemic gets worse,” WHO said in a report.
Convalescent serum, the name for parts of blood taken from survivors, contains antibodies that the body produces to survive a virus.
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An expert panel convened by the UN health agency looked at a variety of experimental-stage treatments earlier this month and agreed that convalescent blood therapies offer the most promising candidate.
Such therapies have not reached the clinical trial stage, but the therapy was used in 1995 to treat eight Ebola patients in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Seven of them recovered.
The latest success was a US doctor working in Liberia, who was declared free of the Ebola virus on Thursday by his US doctors after receiving a blood transfusion from a former patient who also recovered.
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Collecting and using the survivor blood on a larger scale in West Africa will require staff, training, laboratories and safety precautions, WHO said.