Nigeria should use Ebola survivors' blood [convalescent serum] to treat others

Nigeria should Ebola survivor blood [convalescent serum] should be used to treat others

As Nigeria records five survivors of the of Ebola Viral Disease, the blood from the survivors should be used to treat others suffering from the disease.

Two doctors, a nurse and a patient, infected with Ebola Virus Disease were today discharged from the quarantine unit of the Emergency Operation Centre (EOC), at the Mainland Hospital, Yaba, Lagos. The five Nigerians who recovered from the deadly virus  have been discharged from quarantine.

The use of blood of survivors of a disease to vaccinate or treat others is not an uncommon practice in medicine and public health. It works from the logic that the survivors were able to generate antibodies that were stronger and able to withstand the assault of the pathogen.


This form of treatment was successful applied to Ebola patients as far back as 1976 in Zaire during the first recorded Ebola outbreak. As a matter of fact, Zmapp serum was essentially developed based on the same principle, but by culturing the serum artificially in a tobacco plant. Similar treatment has been used to treat people with SARS and Lassa fever, a viral hemorrhagic fever, like Ebola.

As the Ebola outbreaks rages on in West Africa, any potentially viable option should be tried. The World Health Organization (WHO), desperate for a way to help infected people, has muted the idea of using Convalescent serum to combat the virus outbreak. “Convalescent serum is high on our list of potential therapies and has been used in other outbreaks (eg in China during SARS),” WHO said in a written statement to ScienceInsider. “There is a long history of its use, so lots of experience of what needs to be done, what norms and standards need to be met.”

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has gone down in history as the largest ever recorded, with over 2127 people infected with the disease and 1145 already dead in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, and Nigeria. This buttresses the need to try any therapy that is medically plausible to contain the outbreak.

The ethics committee at WHO has declared it was ethical under the special circumstance to use unapproved Ebola treatments such as ZMapp, a mix of antibodies that has been tested in animals and was given to two U.S. health care workers who fell sick in Liberia. Other experts are advocating the use of drugs that are approved to treat other diseases but may help Ebola patients, too.

The use of convalescent serum to treat Ebola patients is quite convinient as getting blood transfusions is quite common; no approval from agencies such as the U.S. Food or Drug Administration or European Medicines Agency is needed, and there is already a large pool of supply as West Africa continues to record recoveries. Convalescent serum treatment has already been tried in the current outbreak. Kent Brantly, one of the two U.S. health care workers who was treated with ZMapp, was earlier treated with the blood of a 14-year-old boy he had cared for and who had survived Ebola. In 1976 convalescent serum was administered to a researcher in the United Kingdom who accidentally infected himself while transferring blood from a guinea pig infected with Ebola, and he survived.

Convalescent serum was tried again in 1995 in an Ebola outbreak in Kikwit in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Doctors at the Kikwit General Hospital treated eight Ebola patients with blood donated by five people who had survived their infections. Seven of those receiving the serum also survived.