The 26-year-old Dallas nurse Nina Pham, who became the first health worker to test positive from Ebola in the United States after taking care of patient zero Thomas Eric Duncan, received a plasma from Dr. Kent Brantly, one of the first Ebola health workers and survivors flown in from West Africa after contracting the disease.
The doctor, who got infected around July and went out of the hospital completely healed by next month, also donated his plasma for other two patients, namely, Dr. Rick Sacra and Ashoka Mukpo, the freelance cameraman for NBC News.
Dr. Brently himself knew all too well the difficulty and uncertainty of being an Ebola patient. He was right in the middle of the outbreak in Liberia, working as a doctor for Samaritan's Purse, when he contracted the infection. It wasn't long before he became gravely ill. Although he was later given with the experimental drug Zmapp, only a few knew that he also received another kind of therapy: a blood unit from a 14-year-old Liberian boy who survived the disease.
The idea of using the serum from a healed patient is not new. In fact, it's been around since the 1970s, around the time the Ebola virus was first discovered. This treatment is known as convalescent serum.
The basic principle behind it is that a person who has just been recently cured from the virus has rich levels of antibodies that can specifically fight the infection. These antibodies, which can now potentially save hundreds of other lives, are in the blood plasma, which is drawn from the donor via a machine.
Further, because these antibodies are already part of their blood, the survivors like Brantly developed immunity to the Ebola strain that made them sick, an opportunity that 26-year-old Salome Karwah from Liberia took. She was working as a nurse assistant in a clinic when she was diagnosed with Ebola. She stayed in the Doctors without Borders treatment unit and survived. Today, she's working as part of the group.
