EXPERIMENTAL

WHO: Survivors’ Blood Can Treat Ebola

Blood antibodies may fend off virus.

The World Health Organization will speed up the use of experimental treatments and vaccines to treat the Ebola crisis, including the use of survivors’ blood. “We have to change the sense that there is no hope,” Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, a WHO assistant director-general said on Friday after a two-day meeting of more than 200 experts. Evidence of the curing effects of survivors’ blood (from which antibodies are drawn in the hope that they will stave off the virus long enough for the patients’ own immune system to kick in) is mixed, but Kieny said the expert panel also identified two promising Ebola vaccines. Results from safety tests of the vaccines will be available in November; if they are promising, production could be ramped up and the serums could be handed to health workers in West Africa.