As of late, reports on convalescent plasma treatment on Covid-19 patients have set off a heated debate over its viability. After the nation’s biggest such preliminary found that convalescent plasma was ineffectual in diminishing Covid-19, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has been thinking about dropping this choice from the public use.
Be that as it may, in a few states including worst hit states Maharashtra and Delhi, health care specialists keep on emphasising the choice while those running plasma blood donation centers advance it with unreliable accounts via social media.
What is convalescent plasma therapy?
Plasma is the liquid part of the blood. In the therapy, the convalescent plasma extracted from blood of patients recuperating from the covid infection serves as a source of antibodies against virus infection to treat those critically affected by the virus. The therapy can also used to immunise those vulnerable of contracting the virus. The donor would have to be a documented case of Covid-19 and healthy for 28 days since the last symptoms.
What has happened to trigger the debate?
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has stalled emergency authorisation for blood plasma claiming that emerging data on the treatment is too weak, triggering issues for countries like India which are going big on plasma therapy.
Of late Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain didn’t consider it as a primary concern and reported to the Indian Council of Medical Research’s (ICMR’s) that convalescent plasma treatment (CPT) isn’t viable as a Covid-19 therapy line.
Earlier ministry also claimed that ICMR has not given any clearance for its use as a prescribed treatment for COVID-19 asserting that the misuse can have adverse outcome for the patients.
The ICMR announced a week ago that it would eliminate the treatment from its Covid-19 treatment convention. The council is putting together its choice with respect to the discoveries of its investigation that was set up on the pre-print worker MedRxivt. Also the examination had discovered that CPT didn’t show any beneficiary evidence on controlling illness and mortality reduction. The results of the PLACID trial at multiple centres were published in the peer-reviewed British Medical Journal on October 22.
Experts’ opinion
Some researchers and health experts as cited in an article in The Print, claim that the inference that CPT is not effective fails to notice a big limitation of the study—it didn’t measure the level of neutralising antibodies (NAbs) that are efficacious against any pathogen in the plasma which was administered to the trial volunteers.
”As a scientific community, ICMR should be brave enough to accept that the therapy doesn’t work and stop the hospitals from prescribing it,” said another renowned epidemiologist.
Besides, the US FDA’s review on the therapy should be a message for India, which is blindly banking on it. The authorization by the US FDA has been shelved as more data is peer reviewed, says the clinical director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In the study, which enrolled 464 adults at 39 hospitals in India, more than 80% of patients had shown to generate antibodies against Covid-19, indicating they were infected the virus a week or more prior to treatment. That’s possibly too late to benefit from convalescent plasma, asserted Arturo Casadevall, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Research coauthor Pankaj Malhotra, a clinical hematologist at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India, affirms that these randomised data results won’t have much impact on clinical practice in India where convalescent plasma therapy is quite known.
While few experts believe that it is too early to caste aside a treatment option and are inconclusive at the moment. Mayo clinic anesthologist Michael Joyner said, had hospitals treated patients early with plasma therapy in their course of disease, it would be proven to be beneficial.