Covid-19: Nepal reports successful plasma therapy treatment
Nepal's health authorities have announced that their first plasma therapy treatment has been successful, according to Xinhua.
A 60-year-old coronavirus patient, who was in critical condition, recovered after receiving plasma therapy, it says.
The patient is now close to full recovery, said Santa Kumar Das, coordinator of a Covid-19 management committee at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu, where the patient is being treated.
He said doctors treated the patient on July 30 with plasma therapy after drawing blood from another man aged about 30 years.
"Before we treated him in this method, the patient required 80-90 percent external oxygen," Das said yesterday.
He explained that 48 hours after administering the plasma therapy, the patient required only 24-28 percent external oxygen, the report added.
He said the hospital considers this a successful case with a patient recovering well and is ready to go home once he tests negative for the virus.
Plasma therapy is not a universally accepted method of treating Covid-19 patients. This therapy is being used as a test case in many countries.
According to Das, 12 hospitals have been appointed where plasma therapy can be performed to treat Covid-19 patients in Nepal.
The Himalayan country has 20,750 confirmed cases and 57 reported deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Coronavirus cases were reported in China in December last year. In March this year, the World Health Organisation declared it a pandemic.
JHU data showed that the officially confirmed coronavirus cases have crossed 18 million with more than 693,000 deaths.
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