By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM — The 19 vials, each filled with 5 cc’s of freshman blood, were carefully lined up on a table in the little room off the first floor lounge in Duke University’s Giles residence hall.

Nurse Sara Hoffman used a butterfly needle to extract the blood for one of the vials from Andrea Alonso, a first-year student from Lima, Peru.

Giving blood didn’t bother Alonso at all — and it helped her cash flow.

“I just really need some money, and this isn’t a very hard way to get it,” she said. “And it just seems really interesting as well.”

It also might be really helpful to the entire Duke student body as well as to the military.

Alonso is one of 50 or so first-year students who have signed up for a Duke University Medical Center study tracking the onset and spread of the flu and other respiratory diseases. The research, funded by an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, is designed to better understand behavioral aspects of viral infection and how clinicians might intervene — before symptoms even appear.

“It’s really a pre-clinic diagnostic for respiratory illness,” said Brad Nicholson, the head of the molecular epidemiological research lab at the Durham Veterans Administration Hospital, and a member of the “flu crew” at the residence hall Tuesday. “The idea, ultimately, is to gather enough information so that if someone is exposed to the flu, we can take a blood sample and tell them what’s going to happen. We can predict whether they’ll get the flu.”

The researchers, who are hoping to enroll around 500 students, take a medical history from each volunteer as well as drawing blood from them, for baseline information. Students then are asked to to fill out a daily Web survey of their health and to report any symptoms of upper respiratory infections.

Investigators monitor the Web reports and if a positive response is confirmed, the researchers will collect additional blood along with samples of other bodily fluids. The volunteers also are asked to identify anyone they have been exposed to who could be infected.

The researchers believe they will be able to track the timing and spread of the virus and track any changes in the volunteers genetic material.

“This could be very useful information for the military, to see which soldiers might get sick,” said Nicholson. “It’s also, obviously, very useful information for a university to have as well, particularly these days.”

To encourage students to volunteer, the program offers a number of financial incentives. Just for signing up, the students got $25. For being tested, another $50. If they fill out the Web questionnaire five times, that’s worth another $50, and if the get a friend to agree to get sampled, they could make up to another $150.

“It’s really easy to do, and you get the compensation,” said Larissa Musgrave, a freshman from Clayton. “It’s a pretty good deal, particularly if you have a friend who gets sampled.”

As Musgrave got up from giving blood, she sat down with Stephanie Dobos, the project’s outtake coordinator, who reminded her about reporting everything on the internal Web site.

“As soon as you have trouble any trouble breathing, we want to know,” Dobos told Musgrave. “If your head hurts, we want to know.”

So far, Musgrave said later, “I feel fine.”