A Plan to Use Survivors’ Blood for Ebola Treatment in Africa | Hacker News Reader

A Plan to Use Survivors’ Blood for Ebola Treatment in Africa

nytimes.com

11 pointsMz8 comments

No mention of HIV which is a fairly important factor, given some of these countries' adult populations are up to 1% infected.

Would be horrible to replace something acute with something equally deadly that just takes longer.

It wouldn't be good, but if the choice is between Ebola and HIV, it's a complete no-brainer. I'm sure that's true even in poorer countries where the drugs are harder to come by.

Yep, absolutely. HIV is not nearly as easy to (unintentionally) transmit, and is much more manageable in the long term.

If I was on my death bed and was offered to take a potential treatment that had a 1% chance of giving me HIV, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

Would this still be the case if monkey studies showed the treatment to be worthless? It's one thing to give someone a treatment that is believed to be effective that carries a 1% chance of HIV infection. It's completely another thing to use a treatment that has had no controlled human studies against Ebola and the one controlled monkey study didn't show any benefit against Ebola, and carries a 1% chance of HIV infection.

Now, as mentioned in the article, the blood will be screened for a variety of pathogens, including HIV, so the risk of HIV infection should be very low.

You can screen for it, but even so ebola is deadly now, hiv is deadly in the future if you don't get treatment.

FYI: It actually does mention it:

One challenge will be to make sure that the donated blood, even if it helps patients recover from Ebola, does not give them H.I.V. or hepatitis.

Not sure about the situation in these countries but at least in first world countries HIV can be treated fairly well, it's definitely not a death sentence and doesn't have to affect everyday life.

At least it would prevent the recipient of the transfusion from transmitting ebola to more people. His life is forfeit (albeit, could live for decades if he gets proper treatment) but tens of hundreds of others are saved (exponential exposure).

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