Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
Hailed by John le Carré 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 Carrés acclaimed novel
The Constant Gardener and the feature film based on it.
"A trenchant exposé . . . meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence" (Publishers Weekly), Sonia Shahs 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 worlds poorest patientsbe experimented upon or die for lack of medicine.
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 Carré is the author of numerous bestselling novels. He lives in Cornwall, England.