Month: August 2008

Is there a "right" to participate in experimentation?

August 21, 2008 / Sonia Shah

Some like to say that people have “right” to participate in clinical trials. People have a right to proven care, not to experiments. Trials are risky for subjects, which is often the whole point of doing the trial. A new review shows the extent.

In a survey of 739 international drug trials published between 1996 and 2002, University of Nottingham researchers found that 71 percent reported adverse events, with 20 percent reporting serious adverse events. Nearly 40 percent reported adverse drug reactions, with 11 percent reporting severe adverse drug reactions. Six were terminated early because of drug toxicity; subjects died in 11 percent of the trials. In two of those trials, the deaths could be attributed to the experimental drug.

And these, dear readers, were trials that might have been expected to minimize risks, for the subjects involved were all children.

See more here.

TIME magazine on clinical trials boom in India

August 7, 2008 / Sonia Shah

Today’s TIME magazine ran a feature on the clinical trials boom in India. It’s a good one, and not only because it quotes me at both the top and bottom of the piece! Check it out here.

Disease journalism

August 4, 2008 / Sonia Shah

My critical review of Lara Santoro’s book on international health journalism appears in The Lancet sometime this month. Link will be forthcoming. In other news from The Lancet, a new study found that 6 weeks of daily nevirapine given to the breast-fed babies of HIV-positive mothers reduced the babies’ risk of getting the virus from their moms by 15%…but six months later, as many were infected as controls.

The reason to even consider giving nevirapine (which has adverse effects in over 30 percent of infants and also can complicate AIDS therapy if it becomes necessary later on) to these babies is because their families lack access to safe drinking water with which to feed them, and so must be fed mothers’ milk despite its contamination with HIV virus. Some of the authors say, it’s a terrible situation, but the drug kind of works, a little bit, so let’s do it, it is better than nothing.

But why is it that it is possible to go to rural and impoverished places and provide tiny little babies with sick mothers pricey, sophisticated foreign-made pills EVERY DAY for weeks on end….and NOT possible to clean up the water?

In a highly unusual move, some of the study’s own authors asked the very same question. Check it out here.