WHO Advises Against the Use of Plasma Therapy to Treat COVID-19 Patients
Posted by HAROON HAYDER
The World Health Organization (WHO) has advised against the use of convalescent blood plasma therapy as an alternative treatment for COVID-19 patients.
According to advice from the WHO published in the British Medical Journal, current evidence suggests that the treatment doesn’t increase survival rate nor reduce the need for mechanical ventilation among Coronavirus patients.
The convalescent blood plasma therapy incurs significant financial resources and time to administer, added the WHO, strongly recommending against the use of the treatment among patients with mild or moderate COVID-19 infection.
In case of severe COVID-19 infection, the therapy should be only administered as part of randomized controlled clinical trials.
The advice from the WHO is based on the analysis of 16 clinical trials held to ascertain the benefits of convalescent blood plasma therapy for Coronavirus treatment. The trials involved more than 16,000 patients with mild, moderate, and severe COVID-19 infections.
Earlier this year in February, a clinical trial held in the US to determine the advantages of convalescent blood plasma therapy was suspended after it found that the treatment is unlikely to improve mortality or ventilation outcomes in COVID-19 patients.
A month later in March, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also scaled back the emergency use authorization (EUA) granted for the use of convalescent blood plasma therapy for the treatment of Coronavirus patients. In August 2020, the FDA initially issued EUA for the treatment to be administered to all hospitalized patients.
Under the revised EUA, the treatment is now only authorized for use among hospitalized COVID-19 patients with early symptoms of viral infection or those with a compromised immune system.
The convalescent blood plasma therapy for the treatment of COVID-19 patients involves extracting plasma from the blood donated by someone who has recovered from the Coronavirus and administering it intravenously to someone battling with the viral infection.
The treatment showed promising signs in the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic as it was used to save thousands of precious lives in the absence of effective vaccines all over the world including Pakistan.
The post WHO Advises Against the Use of Plasma Therapy to Treat COVID-19 Patients appeared first on .
