LEIDEN –
The Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) is researching the possibilities of infecting healthy people with the corona virus. In this way, the hospital hopes to gain insight into the body’s response to a corona infection. Once the funding has been finalized and an ethics committee has reviewed the research, the trial can begin.
–
Internist infectiologist Meta Roestenberg is responsible for the preparations for the study. ‘We are making a scenario to see how that research should be done, and how we keep the risks as small as possible,’ she says at West Wordt Wakker on Radio West.
In the study, a group of healthy subjects between the ages of 18 and 30 years old will receive a small dose of the coronavirus. They are then closely monitored in isolation by doctors and psychologists.
Risks
‘We focus on people between the ages of 18 and 30 who often contract infections, but sometimes don’t even notice. We want to know what differences there are between those people. We want to see if we can predict in advance who could get the virus. Then we can use the measures more effectively, ‘explains Roestenberg.
Roestenberg knows all too well that the research is not without risks. “As a doctor, it feels contradictory to give healthy people a virus.” According to Roestenberg, the LUMC therefore first wants to have a good overview of the risks of the research. “The chance that a healthy person between the ages of 18 and 30 will be hospitalized is 1 in 1000. That is little, but not zero.” And so it is a difficult question: is it worth it? “We are mapping that out,” said the doctor.
“>
Ethics Committee
The LUMC has conducted such contamination studies before, for example with malaria or parasitic infections. ‘You can learn a lot from that,’ says Roestenberg. ‘We do this to be able to develop new vaccines and medicines. There are still a lot of things we don’t know about the diseases we infect humans with. Things we can figure out if we can track an infected person. ‘
Because of the risks associated with the research, an ethics committee will have to determine whether the research is medically acceptable from a medical-ethical point of view.
READ ALSO: ‘Waiting times in hospitals for simple procedures longer than a year’
– .
