From this week’s New England Journal of Medicine: a review of The Body Hunters by Johns Hopkins University’s Jeremy Sugarman, MD, MPH:
“An accessible account… important…powerful…derive[d] from a rich set of sources…. It is critical that those engaged in drug development, clinical research and its oversight, research ethics, and policy know about these stories.” —NEJM, December 7, 2006
The Frontline Club in London is a wonderful venue–part bar, part restaurant, and part theater–devoted to independent journalism. I gave a talk about The Body Hunters there last week, and you can see the video here: www.frontlineclub.com
When I was 18 years old or so, I arrived at the frosty, elegant Chicago offices of JAMA: the Journal of the American Medical Association, in hopes of securing an unpaid journalism internship at the esteemed publication. It was a terrifying experience, and I failed to make the cut. Two decades on, vindication in the form of this wonderful review:
“Investigative journalist Sonia Shah has written a lucid, well-researched work on professional and governmental corruption and mismanagement associated with clinical trials conducted by the pharmaceutical industry in the developing world,” Thomas A. Faunce writes in a review of The Body Hunters (JAMA, Nov 1, 2006, 2149-2150). “It deserves the attention of leaders of the medical profession and policy analysts concerned about the human consequences of US health care costs rapidly approaching the point of unsustainability.”
No sympathy from Tauzin—a cancer survivor himself—for those sickly elders compelled to hobble onto buses to Canada to buy affordable medicines, either: according to Tauzin, these unfortunates are no better than Al-Quaeda conspirators “opening our borders…to future terrorist attacks.” (And for those concerned about the potential for abuse in tens of thousands of secretive clinical trials conducted on the untreated poor of the world, Tauzin points to PhRMA’s toothless “principles” on ethical research as indicative of the industry’s “more responsible role” in “clinical trial transparency and openness.”
As another legislator-turned-lobbyist J. Bennett Johnston observed, “everybody should have a job where they use the knowledge, talents and skills they have.”Quite. Nexium, anyone?
From my Washington Post review of a new book by Terry Tamminen, former head of the California EPA, which ran today:
“The corollary to the new truism that Americans are “addicted” to oil is that we can kick the habit just as we did with Big Tobacco — by penalizing the producers of the drug. So says California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s former environmental adviser, Terry Tamminen, in Lives Per Gallon.
Just like tobacco companies, Tamminen writes, oil and car companies have deceived us into consuming addictive products that pollute the airand make us sick. Describing how automakers and oil companies dismantled the electric trolley systems of numerous American cities in the 1920s, tricked us into using the most polluting fuels and stymied development of cleaner alternatives, Tamminen calls for a fusillade of lawsuits similar to the one that California’s attorney general filed against auto-makers last month for the “public nuisance” of selling greenhouse-gas-spewing cars.
Curtailing tobacco use wasn’t easy,but quitting oil — lifeblood of the economy — would seem quite a bit harder. And yet the Big Tobacco-style approach to slashing oil consumption works for Tamminen because he believes that hydrogen can easily replace oil’s BTUs.
He tries to sell us on hydrogen’s promise with stories about California’s model hydrogen-filling stations and enthuses about hydrogen zapped into being by solar and wind power. His rhetoric –“How many square kilometers of flat roofs are there at just the Kmarts, Costcos, and Wal-Marts of the world?” — would probably sound great ina speech, but significant technical and political challenges are involved in scaling up these technologies. These Tamminen sidesteps, along with the crucial question as to whether making hydrogen from coal or nuclear power — as President Bush, James Lovelock and a host of others advocate — would be any better for the environment than burning oil.
Nevertheless, shifting to hydrogen may well be less burdensome than continuing with ever-scarcer crude. Skeptics, however,won’t be convinced by Tamminen’s accounting, which reads more like the cost of oil to him, not the rest of us. “Perhaps the greatest threat from our oil addiction,” he announces, “is cancer.” That’s a strange assessment, given the threats of petro-fueled terrorism, global instability and climate change. But then again, Tamminen considers diesel exhaust to be “one of the greatest threats to human health” and blames automakers, whom he battled in the Schwarzenegger administration, for his own father’s smog-induced death from emphysema.
Lives Per Gallon‘s portrait of a corporate conspiracy foisting invisible poisons upon us will certainly inflame public anxiety over dependence on oil, but messages of victimization won’t help us solve our energy dilemmas. Crude is, sadly, much more than a fad, and our energy-intense lifestyleis more than the handiwork of deceitful oil and car companies. If only it were so easy.
Sonia Shah is the author of “Crude: The Story of Oil” and “The Body Hunters.”
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Jude Ike Nwokike is a pharmacologist at the public health research institution, Management Sciences for Health. I was especially pleased to hear his thoughts on The Body Hunters:
“Sonia! Your book is marvelous! I have not finished yet, but already feel that you did a great job. Lots of research must have gone into it; your coverage of Xigris is particularly spectacular.”
It always is nice to hear positive feedback, but it is especially gratifying to hear from experts in the field. Thanks, Jude.
Some early feedback from readers of The Body Hunters, both near and far:
“Thank you so much for sending me your book. It is excellent and will
have a special place on my shelf.” —A formerly high-ranking physician with Pfizer
“I really enjoyed reading your book, The Body Hunters. ( Did you base the
title on Paul de Kruif’s book, The Microbe Hunters ?)” —Dr AniruddhaMalpani, Medical Director, HELP – Health Education Library for People, Mumbai, India
“I just read Body Hunters for a review. As an investigative reporter for more than 20 years, I thought it was a very shrewd piece of work. Bravo. I look forward to reading your next book.” –Charles Rusnell, Staff Writer, The Edmonton Journal
“There’s nothing I love more than a good book, unless it is a free good book…Last week I was sent The Body Hunters by Sonia Shah…I can recommend that folks read the book–it’s a well-documented and clearly presented examination of an industry that many of us depend on.” —fenris.org
Important bans protecting prisoners from medical experimentation are on the verge of dissolution.
As reported by the New York Times today in a front-page story, last month the Institute of Medicine recommended that federal agencies drop the bans. The bans, long justified by the fact that people behind bars can scarcely be viewed as voluntarily consensual, stanched a once-booming industry of experimenting on the incarcerated. Drug companies disassembled the testing labs they’d built next to the prison gates.
If lawmakers take up the IOM’s recommendations as expected, the floodgates may once again be opened.
The IOM takes pains to detail researchers’ transgressions against prisoners in scientific experiments–see this NYT video on the Holmesburg trials, for example–but considered that the hypothetical benefits of prisoner research outweigh the certain and well-documented risks.
These lauded benefits, unlike clearly detailed risks, sound wonderful but are curiously vague.
More details to come…For now, chew on the fact that many of the authors of the IOM recommendations conduct prisoner research (to answer various social science and epidemiological questions) themselves. A conflict of interest, perhaps?
I’m thrilled to report that Amazon.com has started to fill orders for The Body Hunters. A fall speaking tour that includes stops in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Tuskegee AL, Athens GA, Spokane, Seattle and London is in the works. I’m really looking forward to hearing what readers think about the book. Please do contact me with your comments or if you are interested in sponsoring an event, at sonia@soniashah.com
Today the New York Times reports on weekly consumer reports conducted by University of Michigan. According to director Richard T. Curtin, many people are suffering from pricey oil–and are changing their spending because of it: just not the rich.
“Cutbacks in spending have been concentrated among households with less than $50,000 in annual income, according to Mr. Curtin’s surveys. That is roughly half of all households. Most of those with incomes above $50,000, which contribute to the bulk of consumer spending, are still managing to absorb the higher energy costs without cutting back much elsewhere. ‘Rising gasoline prices are really driving a wedge between lower- and higher-income households,’ Mr. Curtin said.” —Louis Uchitelle, “Reluctantly adjusting to oil cost,” New York Times, July 20, 2006
Half of us are “cutting back” in spending, that is, doing without. Along with increasing political instability overseas and intensified environmental disruption in oil regions, here is another cost of peak oil: more deprivation and inequity at home.
Sonia on HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, February 15, 2021 episode, "The Next Pandemic"
"How Unhealthy Paradigms Become Contagious"
"Three Reasons We Still Haven't Got Rid of Malaria"
© 2024 Sonia Shah
