Alex Perry, of TIME magazine, shadowed millionaire investor-turned-malaria activist Ray Chambers, the UN Special Envoy for malaria, as he attempted to blanket the continent of Africa with treated bednets, and then wrote this short book about it, which I reviewed for The Wall Street Journal. It was a difficult review to write, because while I admire Perry as a reporter, I had many objections to the way he talks about malaria. I could only fit in a few in the review. Here’s the link.
Category: Science and Politics (Page 2 of 4)
In the end, I had to Skype in to this year’s World Conference of Science Journalists conference in Doha, Qatar, and deliver my presentation on the issue of drug trials in developing countries via YouTube video. (You can check it out here.) Here’s what the Guardian newspaper had to say about it. “Ethics left behind as drug trials soar in developing countries,” The Guardian, July 4, 2011.
Yes, another famous person has come down with malaria! It was British model Cheryl Cole most recently, and now the actor George Clooney, who has just recovered from a bout contracted in Sudan. He’s taking questions about the disease at NYTimes.com, via Nicholas Kristof’s blog.
It’ll be interesting to learn whether he took prophylaxis or not. I suspect he did not. Many Westerners who travel regularly to malaria-endemic regions don’t, including some top malariologists I’ve met. I suppose they feel immune, sleeping in air-conditioned rooms and enjoying easy access to prompt treatment. And mostly they are, compared to the 300,000+ people living in huts and slums who get infected every year. Personally, though, I’d never skip the preventive drugs. The history of malaria shows that that wily parasite and the mosquito that ferries it around are full of secrets and surprises.
On a separate note–I once appeared in a documentary about the film “Syriana,” talking about oil politics in connection with my book “Crude.” As George Clooney stars in “Syriana,” he appeared in the documentary too. Which means, of course, that I was in a movie with George Clooney!
WHO reports this week that multi-drug resistant tuberculosis has reached unprecedented levels worldwide: one in four in some places! Meanwhile here in the US, we’re in a snit over a few modest reforms for health insurers. I have a new article coming out at e360 on how wanton overuse of antibiotics contributes to the spread of resistant bacteria. E.g. much of the antibiotics we feed to our livestock and douse our bodies with are excreted into the environment unchanged, deposited into waterways, spread on crops as fertilizer. When bacteria in the water and soil are exposed to this stuff, it selects for resistant strains….which can then trade genes with other, more pathogenic bacteria (they do that, those bacteria!) You’d be surprised to know the huge proportion of the drugs we consume actually end up in the environment, essentially unchanged. It’s not something most people think about.
Considering the scale of the health issues we face, our national snit over health insurance reform seems especially petty.
Check out the WHO report here.
For Ms. Magazine. Ms. holds a place near to my heart for being the first national magazine that published my writing, way back in the early 1990s.I will be occasionally blogging for their new Ms. blog (which makes me, ahem, “Ms. Blogger”). Here’s a link to my first post, on how a Microsoft exec’s recent TED lecture exploits the suffering of millions of African women and children:
http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/03/08/ted-lecturer-exploits-african-womenchildren/
Check it out, make a comment, let me know what you think!
Harrison Ford, who stars in "Extraordinary Measures" with Brendan Fraser
The Lancet published my review of “Extraordinary Measures,” a paean to the wonders of for-profit drug development, this week. “Compared to, say, espionage or alien warfare, the drug development business rarely appears on the big screen, and its few cinematic portrayals generally involve sinister white-coated characters doing shadowy experiments. In that sense, the new film Extraordinary Measures , in which a desperate father and biochemist race to develop a cure for a rare gene marks a refreshing departure…”
I attended the launch of a new Science and Human Rights Coalition at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC last week, where I witnessed an amazing spectacle: a bunch of top scientists grilling scruffy human rights activists…on possible collaborations. It’s an interesting time for scientists to be throwing their hat into the human rights struggle, after eight years of science being perverted by our political leadership to serve right-wing ideology! Look for my story on the coalition, and what it means for public debate around human rights, in an upcoming issue of The Nation.
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.
My opinion piece on the FDA’s scrapping of the Declaration of Helsinki, and with it adequate protection for the human rights and safety of clinical trials subjects in the developing world, appeared in The Nation online a couple weeks ago. Check it out here.
Sonia’s latest book: The Next Great Migration
Sonia’s latest story in the New Yorker magazine
Sonia’s latest story in the New York Times Magazine
Sonia on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Sonia on HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, February 15, 2021 episode, "The Next Pandemic"
Ted Talks
"How Unhealthy Paradigms Become Contagious"
"Three Reasons We Still Haven't Got Rid of Malaria"
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