Treatment of Ebola with Blood Transfusions from Convalescent Patients (1999)

jid.oxfordjournals.org

9 points·OoTheNigerian··5 comments

"The reason for this low fatality rate remains to be explained."

8 patients do not make a statistically significant sample...

I worked it out using a binomial distribution with a 0.4 chance of surviving.

This comes to (8!/(7! * 1!)) * 0.4 ^ 7 * 0.6 ^ 1 I worked this out to 0.00786 or ~~ 1 percent.

I thought 5 percent was the threshold for statistically significant. If you set the survival chance to the lower 20 percent, its even more significant.

I'm not an expert though, and there may be other problems with the study, but I don't think what you said is accurate.

"The transfused patients did receive better care than those in the initial phase of the epidemic."

The transfusion they received is not the only variable at play.

If normal treatment helped to that degree, would fatality rates be as high as they are? I don't know if the 60-80 percent fatality rate takes into account the inadequacy of the health systems in countries with common Ebola outbreaks.

But yes, I already said there were probably other problems too.

You're going to have a serious problem finding volunteers to work with needles on ebola patients, for obvious reasons.

Then again there are quite a few convalescent health workers now.

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