More recovered Covid-19 patients volunteer to donate their blood plasma

CORONAVIRUS | Twelve Covid-19 patients who have fully recovered from the virus have come forward to donate their blood plasma, according to Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.

The Health director-general said that the blood would be sent to the Institute for Medical Research (IMR) for research and might later be used on patients that are in a critical stage.

"IMR will conduct its research and titration. If there the need arises, we will use the plasma. So far, this is still at an early stage of research. So it is still too early to say whether the plasma can be used on our patients.

"But if the need arises for its use in hospitals, where they need plasma, and we can titrate and concentrate the antibody and such, maybe we can use it for patients who are on Stage 5 for example - those who in need of breathing assistance at the intensive care units," he told a press conference in Putrajaya today.

Noor Hisham was responding to a request for an update on the status of experimental treatments on Covid-19 patients using plasma taken from those who have fully recovered from the virus.

The method was first employed by China to treat their Covid-19 patients, where they used plasma extracted from the blood of recovered patients and thickened its antibodies before introducing it into active patients.

Meanwhile, Noor Hisham was also asked about a news report today where 116 South Korean patients who were cleared from the virus and later testing positive again to be a case of reactivation rather than reinfection.

On this, he said there has been no such cases reported in Malaysia so far but does not dismiss that it is possible to happen.

According to him, the Ministry of Health (MOH) had found cases where repeated tests on patients sometimes return a positive result despite having earlier tested negative. However, these cases were found to be caused by virus shedding.

"We have to see if the positive is a strong positive or a weak positive.

"Sometimes this was caused by virus shedding. We had three cases, including a case of a Bruneian who had been discharged from our hospital, but when he returned to Brunei and tested again there, he was found to be positive (for Covid-19).

"When we contacted the laboratory in Brunei, we learned that this was a weak positive. So maybe this happened because of virus shedding, which is the case of a weak virus that is still in the body and thus a patient can still be found positive.

According to him, MOH also employs a practice to prevent reinfection by giving counselling to patients who have recovered from the virus on how to protect themselves from Covid-19. - Mkini