Why aren't they promoting a passive-immunity campaign

[ghostjmf]

They being the people working on Ebola, everywhere.


A very good Nova segment (after the 1st 1/2 hour of intro; I long for the past days when Nova was primarily a science program) made clear that the way ZMapp works is by combining 3 diff immunity factors to Ebola & growing them in tobacco plants. As opposed to growing them in mice, or eggs, or whatever. Science marches on.


But you can also get immunity factors made by people who have survived. Dr. Kent Brantly, the recent survivor who benefitted from the last ZMapp around for a while, has reported generously donated his blood, with immunity factors in it, to all he's been asked to donate to that his blood matches.


But there are lots of recent survivors in Africa. The Nova program documented a group of 4 who have been studied for about 12 years. The study is also checking how long their immunity lasts.


If the immunity factors can't be completely isolated from living donors' blood, as the news around Brantly's donations seem to indicate they cannot, then any such donation carries risks of whatever else the donor may be carrying. But as long as the blood types match closely enough that a donation wouldn't be certain death, "whatever else the donor may be carrying" is a better bet than trying to fight Ebola on your own. Mr. Duncan's recent death gives lie to the idea that the death toll would be much lower if only victims had access to modern medicine's intravenous hydration methods & so on. These didn't save Mr. Duncan.


The program did touch on "why wasn't ZMapp offered to Africans in Africa?", instead of just to European & American victims, until it ran out completely. The thought expressed by one researcher is "if we had offered this untested-in-humans drug to Africans & they had died anyway we'd really have been criticized for using them as guinea pigs". Yeah, but the European & American victims signed on to be guinea pigs. Africans would too, facing the alternative consequences.