How self-sacrificing are you? Are you willing to follow in the footsteps of Clara Maas?

In case you are a brave soul, and want to do your part in saving the world (and earn $2000 for your trouble), you can volunteer to be bitten by a malaria carrying mosquito. And the deadliest form, no less, and all in the name of advancing science.

From enews.com:

During the next 18 months, The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative will be asking people in Seattle to volunteer to be exposed to the deadliest form of malaria, in order to help them test the effectiveness of more types of vaccines.

With more than 70 scientists focused only on malaria, SBRI develops one of the largest malaria research programs in the United States.

Through this experiment, scientists want to find out which vaccines should be abandoned due to ineffectiveness and which ones should be recommended as very effective.

Never fear, the volunteers will be treated as soon as signs of the parasite appear in their blood. Seattle was chosen as an optimal site because there is very little chance of the volunteers contracting malaria, other than in this experiment.

I read in another article that they already had more than enough people volunteering, and while it is highly likely that they will respond to treatment and not become gravely ill or die from malaria, there is always that slight chance. But it is slight.

Clara Maas, just in case you were wondering, was a nurse who took part in the early yellow fever experiments. During the Spanish-American War, Maass volunteered as a contract nurse for the United States Army. After finishing her second assignment with the army, Maass returned to Cuba in October 1900 to work with the Army’s Yellow Fever Commission, headed by Major Walter Reed. It was established during the post-war occupation of Cuba in order to investigate yellow fever, and one of the goals was to determine how the disease was spread. They strongly suspected the mosquitoes but weren’t sure.

Maass volunteered to be bitten by an Aedes aegypti) that had been allowed to feed on yellow fever patients, in March 1901. She contracted a mild case of the disease from which she quickly recovered. She volunteered a second time, but things didn’t go so well. The researchers were hoping that it would show that her earlier bout of yellow fever had given her immunity to the disease, but instead, she became quite ill. She died on August 24, 1901, six days after developing yellow fever.

She was 25 years old.

There wasn’t any treatment for yellow fever, or modern supportive treatment as we know it today. So I would say that Maass did put herself into a little bit more of a precarious situation that the volunteers who will contract malaria in Seattle.

Clara Maass is one of those unsung heroes that no one really knows about, and largely forgotten about until about 30 years after her death, when a memorial was placed on her grave (I believe that a nurse came across her name while doing research, and campaigned to get the memorial). The Cuban government was the first to honor Clara Maass with a stamp, issued in 1951 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of her death. A school and a hospital unit in Cuba had also been named for her.

In 1976, honoring the centennial of Clara Maass’ birth, a US postage stamp was issued. She was the first nurse to get her mug on a stamp in the U.S.

In case you’d like to read up on her.