Some very much appreciated early praise for The Fever! Bart Knols had this to say:
“Extremely well-researched, The Fever provides a highly gripping account of one of mankind’s worst diseases…Highly recommended.”
The Malaria Consortium is putting on a 8-week exhibition of photographs featuring malaria at the UN headquarters in New York in advance of World Malaria Day on April 25. This weekend, the New York Times featured a selection of the photos, with a brief article on the history of the scourge.
Attention all! I have (finally) created a Facebook page for my writing. Please come visit me on Facebook! There is also now a Youtube channel on my work. Check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/user/soniashahauthor
I was pleased to find a commentary about CRUDE in the Athens daily Kathemerini this morning, in part because I could honestly say, it is all Greek to me….My crude translation (ha!) suggests a fairly positive summary, but if anyone out there can say for sure, please drop a line: sonia@soniashah.com. Check it out here
The French-language edition of my book, The Body Hunters, has been awarded the 2008 Prescrire prize for books on medicine and pharmaceuticals! Every year, the nonprofit journal Prescrire awards a handful of books among the many it reviews for the prize. My understanding is that The Body Hunters was one among five chosen from around 300 titles. Merci! Also, the German newspaper Der Spiegel ran a nice commentary about the German-language edition of The Body Hunters. They’re recommending the book on their website. Check it out here.
ABCNews.com featured a story on a problematic Glaxo clinical trial in Argentina (and quotes me a few times,badly–the last time I do a phone interview for a print piece?!). The allegation is coercion and lack of informed consent. The piece doesn’tpoint out one of the major factors of the story, which is that thevaccine GSK was testing may well be aimed at preventing relativelytrivial conditions such as ear infections, but was tested onimpoverished Argentinian kids with pneumonia. That’s not uncommon–Idescribe a similar trial in my book, aimed at a drug for inconvenientcases of diarrhea in the West but tested on malnourished, HIV-positivechildren in Zambia. Check out the ABC story here
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.
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 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.
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.