417 - An Update on Convalescent Plasma for COVID-19
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2022
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Early in the pandemic, clinicians began to treat people sick with COVID-19 with the plasma of people who have recovered from COVID-19. The idea was that protective antibodies in the plasma would help prevent severe illness and death. Nearly two years later, the evidence is in—and it's being hotly debated. Dr. Arturo Casadevall returns to the podcast to talk with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the results of the COVID-19 Plasma Project and his take on divergent recommendations about using plasma as a therapy.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.3 | Today, our topic is convalescent plasma, the treatment that uses antibodies from people who have recovered from COVID-19 to help others. |
| 0:51.3 | I speak to Dr. Arturo Casa deval from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:58.0 | one of the leading experts and advocates on convalescent plasma. We discuss the latest evidence |
| 1:04.5 | and what it means for patients. Let's listen. Dr. Casa Deval, thank you so much for joining me in public health on call to talk about |
| 1:14.0 | convalescent plasma. |
| 1:15.5 | How are you doing? |
| 1:16.6 | I'm okay, Josh. |
| 1:17.8 | Thank you for having me. |
| 1:19.2 | So we heard about convalescent plasma early on in the pandemic on this podcast, and a lot |
| 1:24.4 | has happened since then. |
| 1:25.6 | So I want to go back a bit to the beginning and maybe just |
| 1:28.4 | ask you to explain what convalescent plasma is. It's a therapy that is made from people. When people |
| 1:35.1 | recover from COVID, they have antibodies in their blood, and they can donate this plasma, |
| 1:40.8 | and this plasma can then be given to other individuals for a treatment of the disease. |
| 1:47.1 | And I've been reading about high-tider plasma versus low-tider plasma. Can you explain what that is? |
| 1:52.7 | So tighter is a word for the amount of antibody. So when we recover, some of us make a lot of |
| 1:59.5 | antibody and some of us makes less antibody. |
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