Given that the outbreak of Ebola has reached historic proportions, and that it threatens to wreak havoc on the entire world, scientists are scrambling to find a treatment or a cure. Most of the experimental treatments involve drugs. Other experimental treatments involve monoclonal antibodies (ZMapp). But the most widely available cure is going to be blood serum from patients who survived.
Jehovah's Witnesses will probably have no trouble in accepting this, contrary to other threads on JWN. The reason I say this is that blood serums are part of what is now acceptable as a "blood fraction". As long as the serum is made into a "fraction", i.e. concentrating the antibodies somehow, then it will be left up to the conscience of the individual JW's.
The blood serum has shown promise of being the most widely available treatment, but it is not without its dangers.
For example, the U.S. has an adult HIV prevalence rate of 0.6%, Canada's is 0.3%. The three most affected countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, have an adult prevalence rate of 1.0%, 1.6%, and 1.4%, which means that you are from two to five times more likely to find someone with HIV in those countries than in North America. The screening for viruses and other factors is critical, to ensure that the serum is safe and doesn't introduce more risks.
Another problem with blood serum is an effect that goes against our common knowledge of antibodies and how they help the patient. In the case of Dengue, HIV, and, apparently, Ebola, giving a blood serum that has antibodies will protect from one strain, but if you are infected with any other strain, the virus is actually HELPED to infect, and therefore you have an even higher chance of dying from the disease.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement
" Several reports in the scientific literature describe a phenomenon called antibody-dependent enhancement of viral infection. In studies of Ebola virus infection of laboratory cells, serum from Ebola patients caused up to a five-fold increase in the number of infected cells , rather than inhibiting infection as expected."