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.
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.
Late last month, a small notice in the Federal Register announced that after more than thirty years, the FDA will summarily excise the World Medical Association’s “Declaration of Helsinki,” the internationally recognized gold-standard for principles of ethical medical research, from its codes. It’s a shocking departure, and one that has hardly made a dent in the mainstream media. Here’s a guest blog I wrote about it for the national consumer rights group Prescription Access Litigation: http://prescriptionaccess.org/blog/?p=273
There have been seven foreign language translations of both CRUDE and THE BODY HUNTERS, but until now, none of my books has been available in Spanish. Now, at long last, 451 Editores will be publishing a Spanish edition of The Body Hunters, translated by Ricardo García. I’m not sure when the publication date is, but Ricardo recently sent me some very thoughtful queries about the book, so I expect a wonderful translation. Updates to follow.
The sixth foreign-language translation of CRUDE will be released this week. The Dutch version is called “Ongeraffineerd,” which I love for being so very much longer than the English version. Apparently, there’s been a lot of interest in the book in Holland. A magazine called Greenpeace Krant, with a circulation of 500,000, is featuring the book, and the Dutch equivalent of the Financial Times (Financieele Dagblad) will, too. I wrote a new chapter for this edition, focusing on Holland’s fascinating petro-history. I’m looking forward to a flood of provocative feedback from Dutch readers. Stay tuned for more.
My new website, ResurgentMalaria.com, launched this week in advance of World Malaria Day on April 25. ResurgentMalaria.com explores the politics and history of malaria, one of humankind’s most fierce scourges. This is a disease we’ve known how to prevent and cure for over 100 years, but which still infects 500 million a year and kills over 1 million. Why that is is the subject of ResurgentMalaria.com. (Clue: it’s a bigger problem than just a failure of donations for bednets or grants for vaccine research.) Check out a podcast about ResurgentMalaria.com from the UN Millennium Campaign here. And a blog post from Prescription Access Litigation (PAL) here.
Today’s Calcutta Telegraph carried a nice review/summary of The Body Hunters, published in India by Pearson. I’m thrilled that the Indian press is covering the book, since I did much of my reporting from India, where there is a real problem with unethical clinical trials. Check it out at: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080328/jsp/opinion/story_9059631.js
The Sepia Mutiny, a very witty blog run mostly by second-generation Indian Americans (like myself) posted a lovely piece about my involvement in CRUDE (the movie) and CRUDE (the book). I’d never read Sepia Mutiny before so took the opportunity to browse and laughed out loud several times. I doubt I’m hip enough to write for them, but knowing they exist makes me happy. If only such things were around in high school…! See http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/004996.html#more The History Channel is re-airing CRUDE on Friday Feb 22 at 8 am. You can also watch it online here.
Crude: The Movie! A few years ago, a documentary fillmmaker from the ABC in Sydney (that’s the Australian public television network) spent a day with me in Boston, talking about oil politics. His film, which he dubbed “Crude” (after kindly discussing it with me), came out in Australia a few years ago, and won a slew of awards. It has some amazing footage in it, the least of which are some clips from that day in Boston with me. (A film crew followed me around at the grocery store while I pretended to shop. Slightly embarassing.) This Sunday, the film airs on the History Channel here in the US. The New York Sun previewed it and mentioned the appearance of yours truly: “The investigative journalist Sonia Shah,who wrote the equally sweeping 2004 book “Crude: The Story of Oil,”lends an ever-so-slight analytic edge with trenchant demonstrations of oil’s inescapability: Plastic-wrapped supermarket veggies from distant farms, for example, pack the double whammy of petroleum-based packaging and gas-guzzling truck transport.” The film CRUDE airs on the History Channel on January 27, 2008 at 8 pm.