'Blood is an entity that people pay a lot of attention to'

March 01, 2015

Last August, the World Health Organization told the ScienceInsider that convalescent serum was high on their list of therapies.

“There is a long history of its use, so lots of experience of what needs to be done, what norms and standards need to be met,” the WHO said about treating Ebola-infected people with the blood of survivors.

In the same article, Daniel Bausch, an Ebola expert at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, agreed that trying the therapy in nonhuman primates and then implementing it in the affected countries in West Africa makes sense.

“It’s gonna be messy, it’s gonna be difficult to do, but at some point we’ll just have to try to plunge in and move forward,” Bausch said.

That messiness and difficulty were very evident this week as the government of Sierra Leone rushed to put out a social media firestorm, which broke after Umaru Fofana posted that a pallet of Ebola blood samples were marooned on the tarmac at Lungi international airport.

In a joint statement by the Office of National Security and Sierra Leone's Ministry of Health and Sanitation, State House said the shipment of 2,792 serum samples were bound for a secure facility in South Africa.

Fofana posted later however that he had received documents appearing to show that the ‪Ebola‬ blood samples seized at Lungi‬ airport had Brussels as the final destination, and NOT South Africa as the State House press release says.