Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register April 1 (Reuters) – The world’s first “human challenge” trial, in which volunteers were deliberately exposed to the coronavirus, found that the symptoms had no effect on how likely an infected person was to transmit the disease to others. The findings underscore the difficulty in preventing community-based infections, as the Word Health Organization (WHO) warns of an increase in cases. The research program, conducted by Open Orphan (ORPH.L) with Imperial College London, showed that among the 18 participants who stuck COVID-19, the severity of the symptoms or whether they had any symptoms had nothing to do with the virus. load on their airways. read more Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Viral load, or virus elimination tendency, was measured by two methods known as focus formation determination (FFA) and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR). “There was no correlation between the amount of elimination of the virus by qPCR or FFA and the grade of the symptoms,” the researchers said in an article published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine. The Imperial test exposed 36 healthy young adults with no history of infection or vaccination to the original SARS-CoV-2 virus strain and quarantined them. read more Since two volunteers were found to have antibodies to the virus eventually, they were excluded from the analysis. Just over half of them became infected with the virus. No serious adverse events occurred and the human challenge study model proved safe and well tolerated in healthy young adults, the research team said earlier this year. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report by Ludwig Burger. Edited by Robert Birsel Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
