KARACHI: Karachi has been at the forefront of blood donation to other provincial capitals as Pakistani hematologists are pleading with coronavirus survivors to donate their blood plasma and help save the lives of others battling the disease.
“We have been extending this help to hospitals in Lahore, Quetta and Peshawar,” Dr. Tahir Shamsi, renowned hematologist and head of the National Institution of Blood Disease (NIBD) in Karachi, told Arab News on Friday.
He said two shipments were already received by Hayatabad Medical Complex (HMC) in Peshawar. “There was a desperate call for plasma for critical patients in Peshawar and we immediately responded to it.”
HMC is the only hospital in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province which treats COVID-19 patients with plasma therapy. The country’s third largest province has been worst hit by the pandemic, recording 35 percent of Pakistan’s virus-related 1,133 deaths. Patients who have recovered are generally unwilling to donate their blood.
“I just saw off two recovered patients from Buner district who donated their plasma, but the response is not as it should be,” Dr. Shehzad Akber Khan, medical director of the HMC, told Arab News.
“In Pakhtunkhwa, people believe it is their religious and social responsibility to help others. There is just a need of raising awareness,” he added, “It’s a national collective effort to fight the coronavirus. The NIBD has provided us the blood groups we don’t have. If they are in need of any rare group that is with us, we will immediately respond.”
“This is a very safe process and donating plasma doesn’t harm the recovered patients,” he said, calling on all those who have won with the virus to donate blood. “Together, we can defeat the virus,” he said.
The therapy involves collecting plasma from the blood of people who have recovered from the infection and developed antibodies to fight the disease. Also called passive immunization, it can help in critical cases.
According to Dr. Shamsi, blood plasma transfusions were used to cure patients during the outbreaks of SARS and Ebola.
Clinical trial results are encouraging. On May 18, 2020, while sharing the results of the first such trial, Sindh Health Minister Dr. Azra Pehechu said three of the eleven patients undergoing plasma treatment recovered after nine days, while most of others were also improving.
Dr. Shamsi expressed hope the treatment. If passive immunization can help prevent 70 to 90 percent of patients from being placed on ventilators, it would be a huge success, he said.
“The trials will also tell us when to transfuse plasma and which category of COVID-19 patients will benefit from it,” Shamsi said. “Since the results of clinical trials have not been published yet, their effectiveness cannot be ascertained.”
The Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) authorized the clinical trials on blood plasma treatment to help treat severely ill coronavirus patients in mid-April.
Explaining the blood plasma donation procedure, Dr. Shamsi said that three weeks after COVID-19 patients have tested negative, they can donate their blood.
“As per protocol, one-liter plasma is taken, bifurcated and saved. Tests are done to see if immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies have developed. The blood is also checked for transmissible diseases like HIV, hepatitis and malaria. It’s also seen if any effect of coronavirus is still present or the disease has completely disappeared.”
The process of transfusion takes between four and six hours. It takes a COVID-19 about 24 hours to stabilize after the procedure, Shamsi said, and after another four or five days doctors can decide whether the person can be removed from a ventilator. The average recovery time after plasma transfusion is two weeks.
“We will have to start a mass mobilization campaign to get donors in Pakistan as soon as possible,” Shamsi said. “The country will need them in large numbers in the foreseeable future.”
Pakistan has recorded nearly 55,000 coronavirus infections. About 17,200 people are known to have recovered from the disease.
