For $3,400, Volunteers Get Doused With The Flu What would it take to persuade you to allow governmen

For $3,400, Volunteers Get Doused With The Flu

What would it take to persuade you to allow government researchers to squirt millions of live flu viruses up your nose?

A recently concluded project at the National Institutes of Health found, among other things, that $3,400 each was enough to attract plenty of volunteers.

“I am happy I could contribute in some way,” says Kelli Beyer, 24, one of 46 healthy people who volunteered for the project. To get the money, the research subjects had to commit to several days of testing, then nine days in a hospital isolation ward once the virus was administered in a nasal spray.

All the subjects got varying amounts of a laboratory-synthesized version of the H1N1 strain of swine flu that touched off a pandemicback in 2009 that sickened millions and contributed to the deaths of more than 18,000 people.

Since one aim of the study was to see how much virus it takes to make people moderately sick, researchers ramped up the dose given to seven successive groups of volunteers. Beyer was in the last of seven groups, so she got the highest dose.

More on what happened to her later. First, you might be wondering why scientists felt they needed to give people the flu.

“Despite 100 years of studying influenza, we still have somewhat limited knowledge of how flu causes disease in humans,” study director Matthew Memoli tells Shots. “These kinds of studies have been done before, but not since the early 1990s.”

Continue reading.

Image above shows influenza viruses (blue) attaching to the cells of the upper respiratory tract. Viruses floating in the air are breathed in and bind to the hair-like microvilli and cilia on the surface of the cells that line the trachea. Image by R. Dourmashkin,Wellcome Images.