The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients - Softcover

Shah, Sonia

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239 ratings by Goodreads

9781595582140: The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595582142 ISBN 13: 9781595582140

Publisher: The New Press, 2007

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Hailed by John le Carr� as "an act of courage on the part of its author" and singled out for praise by the leading medical journals in the United States and the United Kingdom, The Body Hunters uncovers the real-life story behind le Carr�’s acclaimed novel The Constant Gardener and the feature film based on it.

"A trenchant expos� . . . meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence" (Publishers Weekly), Sonia Shah’s riveting journalistic account shines a much-needed spotlight on a disturbing new global trend. Drawing on years of original research and reporting in Africa and Asia, Shah examines how the multinational pharmaceutical industry, in its quest to develop lucrative drugs, has begun exporting its clinical research trials to the developing world, where ethical oversight is minimal and desperate patients abound. As the New England Journal of Medicine notes, "it is critical that those engaged in drug development, clinical research and its oversight, research ethics, and policy know about these stories," which tell of an impossible choice being faced by many of the world’s poorest patients be experimented upon or die for lack of medicine.

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About the Author:

Sonia Shah is an independent journalist and the author of Crude: The Story of Oil. Her articles have appeared in Salon, Playboy, and The Nation, and have been widely anthologized. A 2005 investigative journalism fellow of The Nation Institute, she lives in Boston, Massachusetts. John le Carr� is the author of numerous bestselling novels. He lives in Cornwall, England.

From Publishers Weekly:

In a trenchant expos� of a sinister new trend in the pharmaceutical industry, investigative journalist Shah (Crude: The Story of Oil) uncovers a series of recent unethical drug trials conducted on impoverished and sick people in the developing world. Intricately delineating the causal relationships between past drug scares in America, such as thalidomide, and Americans' consequent reluctance to take part in drug testing, Shah demonstrates how a skyrocketing drug market has accelerated the search for "warm bodies" on which to test new products. Saying that the drug industry's main interest "is not enhancing or saving lives but acquiring stuff: data," Shah focuses in particular on the habitual use of a placebo control group, who receive little or no medical care. Shah concludes by spotlighting how drug regulators turn a blind eye to "coercion and misunderstanding between subjects and researchers," and how researchers actively seek countries that can provide them with a high death rate, so crucial to their data. Meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence, Shah's tautly argued study will provoke much needed public debate about this disturbing facet of globalization. (Sept.)
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