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

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

An eye-opening look at Big Pharma's unethical and exploitative drug
trials in the global South.

"Medical research imposes burdens. But generally speaking, we don't
like to know it….If the history of human experimentation tells us
anything, from the bloody vivisections of the first millennium to the
Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it is that such burdens made secret will fall
heaviest on the poorest and most powerless among us."—from The Body
Hunters

This groundbreaking book reveals the unethical drug-testing practices
of the multinational pharmaceutical industry. In its quest to develop
lucrative new drugs for the world's rich, the industry has turned away
from the health needs of the world's poor. And yet, over the past
decade, Big Pharma has quietly exported its clinical research business
to the global South, where ethical oversight is minimal, and sick,
poor, and desperate patients are abundant.

In The Body Hunters, investigative journalist Sonia Shah shows how the
pharmaceutical industry is using testing procedures in the global
South that would cause scandals in the developed world. In India,
dozens of patients in drug trials have perished suffering deadly side
effects known to the FDA; in Zambia, AIDS babies in clinical trials
have been administered placebos.

The Body Hunters is based on several years of original research and
reporting from Africa and Asia, and describes dozens of trials, as
well as the checkered history of Western medical science in poor
countries.

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In a trenchant exposé 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.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier
Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Journalist Shah isn't afraid to ask hard questions. While
acknowledging that medical science wouldn't be at today's highly
evolved stage without the advantages of centuries of human
experimentation, how moral is it, she ponders, to use humans for
medical and scientific experiments? Her questions get harder when she
exposes the manner in which big pharmaceutical companies conceive,
research, and develop new drugs. Typically, those drugs don't aim to
cure the world's enormous poor-but-sick population. Too often, the
goal is to create not new but copycat drugs to prolong the lives of
America's wealthy elderly population at the direct expense of people
in Third World nations. With references to medical experimentation's
grim history, including Nazi concentration-camp inmate "studies" and
the Tuskegee syphilis study, Shah reveals how the poor, under
informed, or simply powerless have born the weight of medical
advances. The story is as big as the issue is complex, and Shah's
heavily documented account endeavors to be evenhanded, given what are
clearly her own feelings about the topic. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
› Visit Amazon's Sonia Shah Page
Biography
Sonia Shah is a science writer and critically acclaimed author whose
writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles
Times, The Nation, New Scientist and elsewhere. Her latest book is
"The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years" from
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (July 2010).

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