Donating the cure

摘要

In the race to find a treatment for Ebola even the most promising drugs and vaccines are months away from widespread use for patients. Yet one potential cure is available in great quantities-the blood of survivors. On December 8th the first clinical trials of blood transfusions started in Sierra Leone. The experiment is led by local doctors, who say they can no longer bear to sit by as countrymen succumb to the disease. They are motivated by evidence from a 1995 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which seven of eight Ebola patients lived after transfusions of blood from survivors.