Mohamed Fathi, an Egyptian who recovered from Covid-19, winceed as he watched the tubes coming down his arm to give blood plasma, but insisted, “If I can help a person, that’s very clever. “
Cairo’s 25-year-old surveyor put the disease in May, on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr Muslim festival, in one of more than 100,000 reported cases in Egypt, where more than 5,500 people have died from the new coronavirus.
“Losing your sense of taste is a terrible experience,” he told AFP at Egypt’s national blood transfusion headquarters in Cairo, and described only one of his symptoms. “You feel like you’re having dinner for fun. “
Things got worse for the family circle when his elderly father also got infected, making the hot hot summer months in Egypt a hellish time of discomfort due to his recovery from a strong, dry cough and constant fevers.
“I arrived today to make a donation because I didn’t need anyone else to go through what my circle of relatives and I went through,” said the young man in a soft voice, one of two hundred volunteers who have so far participated. in the fledgling project.
Egypt, like the United States and a handful of other countries, seeks to combat component pandemic through convalescent plasma, the aqueous fluid in the blood of recovered patients that is filled with antibodies.
After U. S. President Donald Trump presented it as a remedy, his administration issued an emergency authorization last month to use plasma from patients recovered from Covid-19.
The concept is to collect the plasma and inject it into other patients to give them an immune touch that helps fight the same infection.
The clinical network is divided over the use of plasma to treat Covid-19, however, advocates say the strategy has been shown to be effective in small studies to treat infectious diseases, adding Ebola and SARS.
Emerging plasma clinical trials have been introduced to combat the Covid-19 pandemic in Bolivia, Great Britain, Colombia, India, Mexico, Pakistan and South Korea.
Ihab Serageldin, director of Egypt’s National Blood Transfusion Center, said he believed convalescence plasma was a promising remedy as the breed continues to grow, mass-producing and distributing an effective vaccine.
Since April, he has led the Egyptian crusade by urging the country’s more than 79,000 cured patients to donate their plasma.
“Coronavirus is one of the viruses that does not have a manualArray . . . we are fighting an unknown enemy, so any form of remedy that gives a ray of hope to which we will have to hold on,” he told the AFP.
“If the United States had not discovered this promising, it would have introduced a national crusade by urging patients with recovered viruses to donate their plasma,” he said.
Serageldin said that in Egypt, eligible donors must be between the age of 18 and 60, weigh at least 50 kilograms (110 pounds) and have produced antibodies of some quality.
To date, more than two hundred more people have donated plasma, offering 800 ml of liquid divided into 4 pockets, enough to treat two patients.
Serageldin said the Egyptian plasma project’s good luck rate is not yet known.
Many more donations are needed, he said, and he emphasized that “blood donations are generally low in Egypt, so we are working to raise awareness of the general public. “
The small number of donors led the 37-year-old advertising director Ahmed Mostafa to create a Mosanda (“Support”) application to connect cured patients to inflamed people.
Mostafa has a motivation: he had also caught the disease by the end of May.
“After a month of exhaustion due to the virus, I sought to help in the lives of other patients,” he said.
He teamed up with an Internet developer and doctors to design the easy-to-use Android app, which was released in June.
“We should be the link between the patients, but the reaction has been very slow,” he said.
With minimal online use, it plans to expand its application to a general blood donation service, responding to an urgent need in Egypt’s fitness sector.
Mostafa also sees the app and a centralized and regulated plasma mapping as an option for an emerging black market.
In June, the media reported that plasma bags of cured patients were informally exchanged for more than 20,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,200) each.
While a parliamentarian called for the criminalization of the practice, Egypt’s main Muslim institution, Al-Azhar, ruled that it is not allowed by Islamic law to exchange plasma informally and lashed out at those who “benefited from the pandemic. “
[AFP]
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