Since the pandemic, drug trials that purposely make people vomit, shiver and ache have become a research area of growing interest. All that’s needed: brave volunteers.
I'm Brent Crane, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times.
It was this very cold,
dark mid October morning when I visited the infectious disease lab at the University of Maryland.
I was there to observe a group of volunteers who were sitting
behind a thick glass wall in a sealed room.
Alongside me.
There were these eight scientists in white lab coats and masks.
They were grabbing cups filled with mosquitoes that were carrying malaria,
and they were walking into the sealed room to distribute the cups to the volunteers.
Over a few hours, these volunteers had their arms preyed upon,
and the goal was really quite simple to try to infect them with malaria.
A human challenge trial is deliberately infecting someone in a controlled research setting with,
with a pathogen
or a bacteria with the purpose of seeing how that infection plays out in that person.
In other words, it's getting sick for science on purpose.
I wanted to write this story
because I had read pieces around the debate about challenge trials during the COVID 19 pandemic.
But I hadn't read anything about the experience of the volunteers themselves.
I wondered, who are these people?
Why are they doing this?