Looking for an all-expenses-paid vacation at the Lord Baltimore Hotel? You may want to get in contact with the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health (UMD SPH).

There’s a catch though, your up-to-two-week stay is going to be spent with people who have tested positive for the flu.

UMD SPH is using a $15 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the flu is transmitted.

The study will put healthy people in rooms with people with the flu while they interact and play games.

The healthy participants will wear different kinds of protective gear like face shields or be in rooms with UV filters.

The protection will be used to weed out exactly how the flu goes from person to person.

“If a participant that's wearing a face shield still becomes infected, we know that then they got the flu through inhalation, because if it's through spray borne draft, the face shield would block it,” said Kristen Colman, an associate professor at UMD SPH. “To control for touch, we have a protocol where everyone has to sanitize their hands. If they have to scratch their nose, we have a coffee stirrer that they can use. We're controlling all of these variables.”

The school is looking for participants through the end of February, both healthy and sick. You must be between the ages of 18 and 59. Flu sufferers interested in volunteering can call: 410-706-8800

“Transmission modes of flu is a long-standing debate in the scientific field, even before the COVID pandemic,” Coleman said. “There's a lot of evidence that supports the inhalation of virus. It's important for us to know how the virus is transmitted, so that we can use the appropriate measures to prevent transmission.”

Coleman said understanding more about the transmission of the flu could help prevent another pandemic and help stem the spread of seasonal flu variants.