PLASMA THERAPY SILVER BULLET OR NOT?

Leave, for a moment, those telescopic shots—those world maps filled with red dots, the Covid Tracker popups spinning and dancing on your screen.

- Preetha Nair

Come to a close-up. A place where death is intimate, proximate…and the walls are white with fear. Where the littlest medical decision can mark a before-and-after in your life…can change whether the one who gave birth to you lives or not. Krishna, the daughter of 67-year-old Tushar Mehta*, was there a handful of weeks ago. Imagine the scene. Mehta is losing his battle to the deadly pandemic in a private hospital in Delhi. His daughter is making frantic calls to her acquaintances to make arrangements to shift him to a government hospital. Krishna is holding on to a hope, an idea. The government hospital offers one last avenue to life: it’s authorised to conduct Convalescent Plasma Therapy. Infusing antibodies harvested from a survivor’s blood… that could give her father a fighting chance.

In the bargain between life and death, Convalescent Plasma Therapy has emerged as a new buzzword in the absence of a preventive vaccine or effective treatment against COVID-19. It’s not a new idea, though, and has been around since the late 19th century. That was when physiologist Emil von Behring and bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburou arrived at the idea of using antibodies present in serum—another blood component—to fight diptheria. “In fact, the first Nobel Prize was given to Behring (in 1901) for the use of serum to treat diphtheria,” Dr Arturo Casadevall, a top US immunologist at Johns Hopkins, told