Researchers in Brazil tried the unconventional approach on a woman who suffered from a genetic disease that impaired her body’s inflammatory response and made it difficult for her to produce antibodies that kill off infection.“Depending on their virulence, infectious agents can lead to two outcomes in such cases – chronic infection or death,” said paediatrician and researcher Maria Marluce dos Santos Vilela, a professor at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Sao Paulo state, Brazil.Two months after catching Covid the patient was still testing positive to the virus and was suffering fever, loss of appetite, coughing and low energy, however her lungs and other systems were unaffected, the study published in the medical journal Viruses said.At this point doctors tried treating the woman with convalescent plasma (blood from a patient who had recovered from Covid and produced antibodies against it).After this treatment the patient’s symptoms improved, but two weeks on PCR tests showed she still had the virus and the low energy levels and muscle weakness associated with prolonged infection. “We were worried that the infection would persist for a long time, making the patient even weaker and increasing the risk that she would infect other people,” Dr Vilela said.Patients with the genetic disease suffered by her patient have a deficiency, and sometimes complete absence, of the key immunoglobulin antibody IgA.This antibody is usually present in breast milk, Dr Vilela said.“At the same time, an article came out showing that breastfeeding women immunised with Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine produced milk with a reasonable amount of IgA. We decided on an experimental treatment using breast milk to boost her IgA levels,” Dr Vilela said.Brazil’s breast milk banks are governed by strict legislation and donors must prove they are healthy and supply negative test results for infectious diseases such as AIDS, syphilis and hepatitis. The system also keeps records of which donors are vaccinated.This regulation made it possible for doctors to be confident about using the milk as a therapy.Dr Vilela asked the patient to drink the milk and keep it inside her mouth for several minutes. The treatment was repeated every three hours during the day.“IgA works like a broom in the sense that it sticks to pathogens throughout the gastrointestinal tract so that whatever is improper is eliminated in the faeces,” Dr Vilela said.After a week of treatment the patient tested negative to Covid. Two further tests at ten-day intervals also returned negative results.The researchers said until the breast milk treatment, the virus had remained active in the patient for 124 days.To make sure the patient had not caught a series of different Covid infections one after the other researchers sequenced the genome from three viral samples collected from the patient at various intervals.These tests showed she was chronically infected by the same virus.
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