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Would you respond to such an ad? What about someone who promises severe diarrhea? How many service stars would entice you to add a sexually transmitted infection to your stay? Perhaps a good cash payment would help?
Welcome to the bizarre world of human testing, coming soon to a biosafety quarantine center near you.
Spurred on by a collective nightmare COVID-19 pandemica growing number of researchers are asking healthy people to sign up for experiments that deliberately make them sick. And from dysentery and cholera to gonorrhea, volunteers are agreeing to contract diseases in greater numbers than ever before.
As we discuss on page 38, trials are a quick and relatively cheap way to test vaccines and treatments and monitor the progress of infections. They are also not as dangerous as they might seem. Trials are only given the go-ahead if there is strict medical supervision and if symptoms can be quickly managed with effective treatments.
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Intentionally infecting healthy volunteers is unsafe and ethical guidelines are unclear.
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But they are not without risk, and their ethics are not clear. Unlike people with a disease agreeing to try an experimental drug that might cure them, challenge trials aim to make people feel worse, at least briefly, with little or no direct medical benefit in return.
And it is not always possible to guarantee that there will be no lasting consequences. Some ethicists, for example, are still unhappy that British scientists conducted trials with Covid-19 during the pandemic, due to the risk of causing chronic symptoms of the virus. long covid.
But the pandemic has also highlighted the enormous positive value and impact of vaccines. The data collected so far suggests that human trials are safe, especially in young and healthy people. Since this research could accelerate the development of new defenses against long-standing scourges including malaria, Zika and norovirus, the only real question should be: How can we do more?
