Regional hospitals treat Covid cases with ' immunity blood'
ANTIBODIES from patients who have recovered from Covid19 are being used as a weapon against the virus in some regional hospitals, kickstarting a process that would otherwise need a vaccination.
Denia and Alicante hospitals and another eight centres across the region are trialling the use of blood plasma taken from survivors to use in people with mild to moderate symptoms – a technique they say is currently being used in other top hospitals worldwide and has been trialled during other pandemics.
One of the three people on the research team in Denia, Dr Ángel Pellicer, said: “At the moment, apart from corticoids, we’ve no evidence that anything attacks the virus properly in patients with a severe strain of Covid19.”
The idea, he explained, is that those receiving a vaccine develop their own antibodies to fight off a dormant version of the virus contained within the inoculation and which it is supposed to target – but with people who have already had Covid19 and have since tested negative, their blood still contains the antibodies that fought it off.
These are only believed to last two or three months at the most, but while they are still present, injecting them into someone who is infected is believed to help kill off the virus in their system the same way it did in the donor’s.
Once the Covid patient has signed an agreement, after
being told what is involved, the hospital requests a blood bag from the transfusion centre in Alicante and receives it within two hours.