The World Health Organization (WHO) advised on Tuesday against the use of plasma therapy to treat corona patients with mild or moderate symptoms.
In the British Medical Journal, the WHO says that “current evidence shows that survival does not increase and the need for medical ventilators does not decrease” when a patient has received plasma therapy. In addition, the treatment method is expensive and time-consuming.
For that reason, the organization says it “strongly recommends” the administration of convalescent (healing) plasma against Covid-19 to people who are not seriously ill because they have contracted the coronavirus. However, according to the WHO, even in seriously ill patients, plasma therapy should only be used as part of a clinical trial.
Plasma therapy uses the antibodies from the blood of donors who have already had the infection. At the beginning of the corona pandemic, therapy was seen as a promising method for treating certain patients. The then US President Donald Trump, among others, advocated the accelerated use of plasma therapy. However, experts have been saying that there is no evidence for its effectiveness.
The WHO bases its advice on the research results of sixteen clinical experiments in which more than 16,000 corona patients with various symptoms were treated.