Plasma therapy to be dropped from ICMR's Covid protocols?

Plasma therapy could be dropped from clinical management protocol of Covid-19 as ICMR’s expert panel found that the therapy wasn’t beneficial in reducing the progression to severe disease or death of patients, a CNN-News18 report said quoting sources.

The Indian Council of Medical Research is expected to issue an advisory on the same in the next few days. India’s national task force on Covid-19 management met on Friday, to review the convalescent plasma therapy for infected patients. The present guidelines allow “off label" use of plasma therapy at the stage of early moderate disease, that is, within seven days of the onset of Covid-19 symptoms and if there is availability of donor plasma.

A group of 18 clinicians, scientists and public health professionals had recently written to the government, saying the “irrational use” of plasma therapy “raises the possibility of more virulent strains” of Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. In their letter, the experts cited three studies — the ICMR-PLACID Trial, the Recovery Trial conducted by the University of Oxford, and Argentina’s PlasmAr Trial — to argue that the country’s existing guidelines on plasma therapy were not based on evidence.