Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8823

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: book

Shah S.
The Body Hunters:Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients
New York: The New Press 2006
http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1301

Abstract:

An eye-opening look at big pharma’s unethical and exploitative drug trials in the global South
Medical research imposes burdens. But generally speaking, we don’t like to know it. . . . If the history of human experimentation tells us anything, from the bloody vivisections of the first millennium to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it is that such burdens made secret will fall heaviest on the poorest and most powerless among us.
-FROM THE BODY HUNTERS

This groundbreaking book reveals the unethical drug-testing practices of the multinational pharmaceutical industry. In its quest to develop lucrative new drugs for the world’s rich, the industry has turned away from the health needs of the world’s poor. And yet, over the past decade, Big Pharma has quietly exported its clinical research business to the global South, where ethical oversight is minimal, and sick, poor, and desperate patients are abundant.

In The Body Hunters, investigative journalist Sonia Shah shows how the pharmaceutical industry is using testing procedures in the global South that would cause scandals in the developed world. In India, dozens of patients in drug trials have perished suffering deadly side effects known to the FDA; in Zambia, AIDS babies in clinical trials have been administered placebos.

The Body Hunters is based on several years of original research and reporting from Africa and Asia, and describes dozens of trials, as well as the checkered history of Western medical science in poor countries.

Sonia Shah is an independent journalist and the author of Crude: The Story of Oil. Her articles have appeared in Salon, Playboy, The Nation, Orion, and elsewhere, and have been widely anthologized. A former editor at South End Press and at Nuclear Times, she lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Notes:

Comment from E-drug: “Written in an easy flowing, reader-friendly and non-technical language, this book exposes unethical practices in drug development particularly in the resource-limited countries. Sonia Shah did extensive research and lots of traveling and her accounts of clinical trials on ARVs, unproven Trovofloxacin in 1996 meningococcal meningitis outbreak in Nigeria and activated Drotrecogin alfa for severe sepsis are particularly spectacular.”