Sonia Shah Waverly, Iowa
September 25, 2012. 11:30 am. Wartburg College Convocation address, “The Science and Politics of Malaria.” Waverly, IA.
The Body Hunters
The Body Hunters
The Body Hunters
Testing New Drugs on the World’s Poorest Patients (New Press, 2006)
By Sonia Shah
Foreword by John Le Carre
Winner, Prix Prescrire 2008
Library Journal’s Best Consumer Health Books, 2006
Available in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean
Imagine the uproar if dozens of drug-trial patients in America were to perish from deadly side effects known to the FDA. Consider the commotion if AIDS babies in Europe were to die while being administered placebos rather than potentially life-saving drugs. These scandals did happen—just elsewhere. In The Body Hunters, investigative journalist Sonia Shah describes drug trials in places like India and Zambia that would have occasioned outrage if conducted in the developed world.
The Body Hunters describes how the multinational pharmaceutical industry, in its quest to develop lucrative new drugs, has begun quietly exporting its clinical research business to the developing world, where ethical oversight is minimal, and desperate patients abundant. Faced with crumbling facilities, miniscule budgets and towering health crises, developing countries often encourage these very trials, even as they cause scarce resources to be diverted from providing care toward the business of servicing drug companies.
Based on several years of original research and reporting from Africa and Asia, The Body Hunters is a damning indictment of a new realm in the exploitation of the world’s poor. Tracing the checkered history of Western medical science in poor countries, it exposes the impossible choice being faced by many patients in the developing world—be experimented upon or die for lack of medicine.
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Excerpt from The Body Hunters
From the preface
My life and the lives of some of my closest relatives continue thanks to the interventions of modern medicine, a scientific art that has marched forward in fits and starts on the crucible of clinical research. The drugs that enabled me to survive an emergency caesarian section, those that allow my son to breathe despite allergic asthma, the other ones that correct a hormonal deficit in my mother have been administered to us with success and confidence in part because they’ve been tested in hundreds and perhaps thousands of human subjects in experimental trials. Not only that: these successful drugs follow on the heels of countless other failed drugs, each of which was also tested on scores of warm bodies, some of which may have been harmed by their shortcomings.
There’s nothing terrible about the truth that medical research imposes burdens. But generally speaking, we don’t like to know it. We don’t like to see it. The very notion of experimenting upon humans sounds sinister. And yet, if anything, we only ever want more drugs to help or enhance us, and more data to assure our trembling selves of their safety and effectiveness. The response to these contradictory desires has been the same since the mid-1800s, when scientists hell-bent on dissecting animals skirted the outcries of British antivivisectionists by cloaking their slicing in secrecy. Today, savvy drugmakers loudly publicize new medical products, but conduct the required experimentation quietly. And so, while we exult in, bicker over, and complain about the products of medical research—how much do the drugs cost? who pays? what are the side effects?—the vast business of percolating new drugs burrows underground.
If the history of human experimentation tells us anything, from the bloody vivisections of the first millenium to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it is that the potential for abuse will fall heaviest on the poorest and most powerless among us.
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The Body Hunters
Contents
Chapter One: Clinical trials go global
Chapter Two: The placebo control
Chapter Three: Growing the pharma monolith
Chapter Four: Uncaging the guinea pig
Chapter Five: HIV and the second-rate solution
Chapter Six: Drug trials and AIDS denialism
Chapter Seven: The one-billion-body politic
Chapter Eight: Calibrating ethical codes
Chapter Nine: Fudging informed consent
Chapter Ten: Tipping the scales
