You're reading: Volunteers to test resistance to heat and smog in Russia

MOSCOW - Six volunteers spent a month under simulated harsh weather conditions similar to those in Moscow in the summer of 2010 as part of an experiment to test the human organism's degrees of resistance to abnormal heat, smog and humidity.

“In that experiment, we recreated conditions like those in Moscow in July and August 2010. In an experimental complex where the Mars 500 experiment was conducted earlier, we placed six volunteers in heat of up to 38 degrees Celsius and in very humid air polluted with carbon monoxide for exactly a month,” Yevgeny Chazov, general director of the Russian Cardiological Research and Production Complex (RKNPK), told reporters.


The volunteers had their heart, blood vessels, nervous systems, water and salt balance, kidneys and resistance to the development of blood clots tested during the experiment, which was finished on Monday and was expected to provide data for evolving methods of human adaptation to climatic abnormalities, Chazov said.


“No such research has been carried out anywhere else in the world. This is just the first phase. During the second series of experiments, we want to check the effects of atmospheric pressure on the organism,” he said.


Chazov said preliminary findings would be publicized in two week’s time.


The experiment was a joint effort of RKNPK and the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems.


The director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems, Igor Ushakov, said the volunteers had no serious health problems during the experiment, but that some of them initially had individual complaints.


“That is understandable, because everyone will have some health abnormalities even by age 20, let alone 40, and they may be aggravated with extra stress. Data were obtained during the experiment on minor aggravations of chronic diseases in our volunteers,” Ushakov said.


He said the volunteers were males aged between 22 and 45 – a physician, a company manager, two security guards and two cargo handlers.


“The purpose of our experiment was to see how factors in the experiment would affect the human organism, and what changes to medical, biological and psychological characteristics members of that heterogeneous group of test subjects would undergo,” Ushakov said.