Flu round-upBlood transfusions may serve as stop-gap during flu epidemics
Therapy from the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak is reconsidered as health officials worry about vaccine supplies; recovering patients could transfer antibodies to the sick; studies will continue to test applicability to avian flu
When it comes to medicine, the old ways are rarely the best ways, though certain fashions — we are thinking particularly of leaching — sometimes come back in a more scientifically-sound form. We were thus extremely interested to read that an unusual treatment from the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic is now being reconsidered as a stop-gap alternative to Avian flu vaccination. Stephen Hoffman, chairman of Rockville, Maryland-based vaccine developer Protein Potential, argues in a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that transfusing blood from recovering patients into ill ones may aid greatly in recovery, at least in the short-term.
Though we often think of the twentieth century as medicine’s golden age, doctors in the 1910s understood very little about the immune system, “but there was this sense that there were immune factors in the blood that could be used to help other patients,” said Hoffman. Serotherapy, the practice of transfusing blood for health reasons other than blood loss, works because a recovering patient’s blood plasma contains flu antibodies. A sicker patient can therefore piggyback on the efforts of the other’s immune system. The procedure is not a guaranteed success, but studies from the 1918 outbreak showed that serotherapy did help save lives: “37 percent of those who didn’t get the transfusions died compared to only 16 percent of those who got passive serotherapy,” Seed Magazine reported.
Hoffman hopes that, if further tests show the procedure works with Avian flu, doctors may be able to use it if a vaccine is unavailable (none so far has been developed). “It might be the only intervention that a particular physician in a particular community hospital might have,” Hoffman said. “But that’s not something you can unleash on any medical community without proper study. It’s a disease for which there’s little else, and we have to prepare to study it now.”
-read more in Emily Anthes’s Seed Magazine report; Protein Potential Web site
