Dengue Fever Researchers in Military Weigh Infecting Volunteers

Scientists at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research are considering resurrecting a research program that would infect healthy people with dengue fever, the potentially deadly mosquito-borne disease that has no specific drug treatment.

The tests raise ethical issues, but advocates say they are offset by the need to halt the dramatic growth in the disease. As many as 50 million people a year are infected with dengue, a 30-fold increase in the last 50 years. The disease causes 22,000 deaths each year, mainly among children, the World Health Organization says.

“Here you’re way out on the end of the risk-benefit spectrum,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. “It’s ethical to do it, but you have to go in with your eyes wide, wide open.”

The purpose of such a study, known as the “human infection” or “human challenge” model, is to see which viral strains cause mild dengue illness in people. The strains that make people sick are used to test potential vaccines and drugs, possibly leading to prevention and treatment of the disease.

The human-infection model is commonly used by researchers and drug and vaccine makers to study other diseases, like malaria, flu and infectious diarrhea. But the stakes are higher with dengue because there is no antiviral medication available to treat it.

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