Newsweek’s short piece on malaria in Africa (September 24, 2007) is full of misinformation and mythology. For example, there has never been any continent-wide malaria control in Africa, as the lead sentence brazenly states; mosquitoes develop resistance to DDT by exposure to brand-name pesticides sold by Western chemical companies like BASF and others, not just [...]
Nigerian authorities slapped criminal charges on Pfizer this month, alleging that the company’s infamous 1996 botched antibiotic trial there was “rash and negligent,” and endangered lives.
Some of the subjects in the trial died, others suffered permanent disability, and the prosecutors say it’s Pfizer’s fault for providing a too-low dose of its comparator drug. (Listen to [...]
A short but pointed interview with me appears in The Internationalist this week, along with a cool watercolor portrait (!). Check it out at The Internationalist.
I recently asked a bunch ofnurses at a NIH-funded malaria research clinic in Malawi where all thelocal malarial mosquitoes bred, and they answered in unison–“in theswamp.” Not so, said the mosquito biologist in the next building over.In fact the bugs that were killing their patients nursed their young inthe puddles right outside the hospital’s unscreened [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Last week’s front-page Washington Poststory detailing a long-suppressed Nigerian government report on Pfizer’s botched 1996 experiment on Nigerian children shines much needed light on a dark corner of globalization: the drug industry’s human experiments overseas. But those who are now calling for stricter regulations on the practice aren’t goingnearly far enough.
According to the May 7 [...]
Tina Rosenberg’s long opinion piece in today’s New York Times brings much needed attention to the plight of “poor people’s diseases,” from sleeping sickness to tuberculosis (“The Scandal of ‘Poor People’s Diseases,’” New York Times, March 29, 2006). But her argument about malaria—that more DDT would vanquish the disease—is all wrong.
The basic gist of the [...]
Something went horribly wrong in an early experimental trial of a German start-up drug company’s new cancer-and-arthritis med. Sometime last week, the drug—TGN 1412—was given to 6 healthy volunteers in a routine Phase 1 trial, designed to test the drug’s safety. Today, all six of those volunteers are laid up in intensive care wards in [...]
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Sonia Shah