A promising Ebola virus treatment that was being tested in Guinea has turned out to be not very effective at stopping the progress and spread of the virus, a new study has suggested. The study was testing a method of therapy called passive immunotherapy. It was done by a team of doctors led by Dr. Johan van Griensven of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium. The study was done in collaboration with the National Blood Transfusion Center in Guinea. The results of the study were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, according to Reuters.
This study involved the administering of plasma from the blood of the survivors of the Ebola virus disease to people suffering from it. This is done with the anticipation that the antibodies that presumably helped those previous survivors survive would also help the other people suffering from the disease. However, the study has not found evidence to support this strategy.
The study administered the plasma to 84 people suffering from the disease. They then compared the death rates in this population with that in the population of 418 people infected with the virus that had been treated at the same center before, but had not been administered the survivors' blood plasma. The death rates in the two populations were 31 percent and 38 percent respectively. However, when they accounted for other factors that could have impacted survival, the difference between the two death rates declined to as little as 3 percent, according to the New York Times.
Over the past several years, the outbreak of the virus in Africa has caused significant death (11,000 deaths) and suffering. In modern times, perhaps no other viral outbreak quite compares with the suffering that the Ebola epidemics have caused.
Scientists have considered several different treatment strategies for Ebola. These include the passive immunotherapy method using plasma convalescence (whose field test report you are reading in this article), a mixture of antibodies called ZMapp that has been manufactured in a laboratory, and the use of an antimalarial drug, amodiaquine, according to Science Magazine.
With disappointing results for one of these strategies, scientific attention is now expected to shift to the other promising strategies that are yet to be tested in the field.
