You Can Volunteer to Be Infected With the Zika Virus | Mosquito Control

Usually people don’t just offer to catch a horrible virus. But that is exactly what the U.S. researchers of two possible vaccines want you to do. They need to do a human challenge study, which is very rare, and test these vaccines on actual people before they can then get them ready for public use. While they are expensive and difficult to perform, they do come with some distinct advantages that we can’t really afford to ignore. Firstly, you have the advantage of speed. Testing these vaccines on people in a controlled environment is much quicker than waiting for people to become infected and then try the vaccine. With the way this virus is spreading, and the growing number of health issues it causes, we need these vaccines pronto. The other major advantage to this kind of human trial is that by keeping track of these infected people every step of the way they can also learn a whole lot more about the virus itself.

The trials are set to start this month. A second round of research will be performed six months after this one. So, if you’re not sure whether you want to risk your health to possibly save many lives just yet, you can still think about it for a while before the opportunity is gone.

Would you offer to be infected by the Zika virus?