In one of my Facebook groups a few weeks ago, one of my friends posted a link to a drug trial that paid test subjects $2,300 for a six-week study.

“For that kind of money,” I jokingly replied, “do we actually have to get malaria?!”

It turns out – well, sort of.

All participants get bitten by a mosquito carrying the malaria parasite, and then treated with the drug being studied. If the drug successfully fights off the parasite, the test subject doesn’t get the symptoms; if the test subject does show symptoms, they’re treated with a different drug that combats the symptoms so that they go away after two or three days.

Thus, if you’ve heard horror stories from friends who traveled to (or come from) Africa and had the miserable experience of getting infected with malaria, the worst-case scenario for the drug trial is probably not going to be that bad, but they do warn you up front.

Besides that risk, the main caveats are the time that you have to carve out and the travel restrictions. After getting bitten by the mosquito and treated with the drug, you have to remain in a hotel room down the hall from the medical staff for 72 hours and cannot leave (although friends can come and visit you – malaria’s not contagious, although you have to convince your friends of that).

Once you’re “released” from the hotel, you have to come back to the center for recurring checkups and blood draws – every day initially, then every other day for a few weeks, and finally twice a week until the end of the trial (the exact time periods vary depending on the study). And you can’t travel anytime during that period.

The bulk of the $2,300 payment comes in the form of $50 for each blood draw visit over the course of the study. Factoring in travel time and the fact that the visits last “from 30 minutes to 2 hours,” my rough guess is that you’d make $30-$50 per hour for all the time you spend in the trial.

Fred Hutch seems to try to recruit people to join the study more for altruistic reasons (a new anti-malarial drug could save many lives), and to discourage people from thinking of this as a way to make money – their FAQ even says, “Do I get paid to get malaria? No. We compensate participants for time and travel” (“compensating for your time” being what most people refer to as “getting paid”).

It turned out that in my first sit-down meeting with the doctors, they told me that test subjects can’t have taken any over-the-counter medicines in the last two weeks, and I casually mentioned that I took a multi-vitamin every morning – whereupon they told me that disqualified me from this round of the test.

I thought back and asked the doctor, why didn’t they tell me (and all the other potential test subjects) two weeks prior, that if we were taking multi-vitamins, we had to stop taking them at that point? The doctor shrugged and said that the study is limited to males 18-40, and “Dudes don’t take multis.” (I tried to check on Google if it’s true that women take more multi-vitamins than men, but all I could find were forum posts from people asking if it’s OK for men to take women’s multi-vitamins.)

So, they’ve got my number and I’ll wait to hear from them in the next round, at which time I’ll be sure and mark my calendar to stop taking my vitamins two weeks before the trial starts.

In the meantime, I wonder how many of my friends will read this and think “What the hell were you thinking?” versus “How can I get in on that?”