THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: With the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) now giving nod to Kerala to use convalescent plasma therapy for treatment of severely ill COVID-19 patients, a medical task force from the state is set to implement the same.
Anoopkumar, a member of the task force, said this process is done first by conducting a blood test on a coronavirus positive patient who has turned negative (read as cured).
“The positive patient after turning negative has to undergo two such tests to further clarify that it’s negative. Then after 14 days, the blood is tested to find the antibody presence. If it’s above a certain level and the person is above 55 kilograms in weight, then 800 ml of plasma is separated and it’s further split into 4 parts. Of this 200 ml is used to treat a positive patient whose condition is just turning serious,” said Anoopkumar.
The plasma collected can be stored for several weeks.
As of Thursday, Kerala has 345 people who had earlier tested positive for coronavirus and have now been confirmed as negative.
The antibody blood testing will be done at the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology in the state capital.
Earlier in the day, Manoj Murhekar, Director, National Institute of Epidemiology, ICMR, said, “We are in the process of finalising the protocol for convalescent plasma therapy. Then we will have to take approval from the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) before conducting any clinical trial.”
Murhekar also said that the therapy will not be used for all patients, but only for severe cases such as those on ventilator support. He said that many countries have found it successful in limited clinical trials.
“It is only for severe patients who are on ventilators and not for patients with less severity,” Muherkar asserted.
Joint Health Secretary Lav Agarwal told the media that two laboratories under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Hyderabad and New Delhi have started working on genomic sequencing to understand the evolution of the COVID-19 virus.
The ICMR has tested 1,30,000 samples in the country so far. Of these, 5,734 have tested positive. The rate of positive cases ranged between 3 per cent and 5 per cent in the last 1-1.5 months. “It has not increased substantially. On Wednesday we tested 13,143 samples,” said Muherkar. (IANS)
