Oct. 22, 2014 -- Three Americans who have survived Ebola may have one man to thank for their recoveries: Kent Brantly, MD.
Brantly, the first person to be treated for and recover from Ebola in the U.S., donated his blood -- and the potentially lifesaving proteins it contains -- for their treatment.
Ashoka Mukpo, a freelance cameraman infected as he covered the Ebola outbreak in West Africa for NBC, thanked Brantly in a statement Oct. 22 as Mukpo was released from an Omaha, NE, hospital.
Mukpo said Brantly’s “generous blood donation played a pivotal role in my recovery ... May his health flourish and his compassion be known to us all.”
Brantly, a doctor with the Samaritan’s Purse aid organization, has also given blood to Nina Pham, the Dallas nurse who caught Ebola as she treated a Liberian man, and Rick Sacra, MD, another Samaritan’s Purse doctor who was also infected in Liberia.
In each case, Brantly was paying it forward. Early in his treatment, he was the recipient of a blood donation from one of his young patients who survived the disease. And he’s said he would continue to give his blood as long as it’s needed and he’s an appropriate match.
Another survivor, British nurse William Pooley, reportedly has also donated blood in a bid to help victims recover.
New Hope in an Old Idea
The idea behind blood donations from disease survivors to those who are still sick is an old one. Doctors have been using so-called convalescent transfusions since at least the late 1800s to treat bacterial and viral infections after scientists realized that there was something in survivors’ blood that they could pass on to help others.
That special something turned out to be proteins called antibodies, which the immune system makes in response to an infection. Antibodies stick to viruses, and that prevents them from multiplying.
But sometimes, in a fast-moving infection, the body can’t make enough of its own antibodies to successfully fight off the disease. In those cases, getting a boost from someone else’s antibodies might help, at least in theory.
The approach was first tried to treat Ebola in 1976. A young woman infected with the virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo was given blood from a survivor of a closely related viral disease called Marburg. She had less bleeding than other Ebola patients, but died soon after her transfusion.
In 1995, doctors gave blood from recovered patients to eight people who were fighting Ebola in Congo. Seven of the eight survived.
But when scientists tried to repeat those results in monkeys -- giving blood from monkeys who had survived Ebola to animals newly infected with the virus -- all the monkeys who received the transfusions died.
source : Could Survivors’ Blood Stop Ebola?
