25 Health workers of BBCI Donate Plasma

25 health workers including doctors of B. Barooah Cancer Institute (BBCI) who were asymptomatic patients of COVID-19 and now recovered have come forward to donate blood for plasma therapy in response to the public appeal made by state health and family welfare minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.

According to Dr Amal Chandra Kataki, Director of BBCI, convalescent plasma therapy is a form of passive immunization for the treatment of human infectious diseases. In 1890, the first rational approach exploited by the physiologists Dr. Emil von Behring and Dr. Shibasaburo Kitasato to treat with diphtheria with blood serum.

Initially, it was produced from immunized animals but soon whole blood or serum was collected from patients recovered from diphtheria. The convalescent plasma therapy has been tried in many parts of the world for the management of moderate to severe COVID-19 patients. Presently, convalescent plasma therapy is used as an experimental model and the limited preliminary outcome shows a promising result.